Disenchantment and participatory limits: Schooling at a crossroads in rural ethnic China

Despite the global image of China’s educational success, despite the cultural belief in education for social mobility, schooling in rural ethnic China is plagued with widespread disenchantment and alarming attrition rates. In the two rural minority schools where I conducted this research, over 30% students drop out before completing the 9th grade, often with the tacit consent of their parents, and seek work as a more realistic path to social mobility. This dissertation explores the complex formation of such disenchantment and participatory limits of education by situating schooling within China’s larger modernist quest to transform its “holdout” population—namely the rural ethnic minorities—from being the national burden to becoming the national assets. The efforts to modernize rural ethnic populations bring into play a wide array of mediating factors that often produce messy discontent and challenge the neat policy template of education and development.;Specifically, this work is based on sixteen months of multi-sited ethnography conducted in a Miao and a Dong village-town in Southwest China’s Guizhou Province. It examines how state educational campaigns are entangled with other rural development agendas to produce a nexus of forces that both promote and strangle village schools. I adopt an ecological perspective that locates educational issues not merely in schools, but as embedded in the cultural-economic-social landscape of rural China. As the study illustrates, state educational campaigns for access, quality, and accountability are lived in everyday predicaments and maneuvers in two rural schools; schooling has become a polemic site increasingly penetrated by developmental state programs, audit culture, tourism agenda, and translocal labor migration to produce unintended consequences. The goal of this dissertation is therefore to unpack the limit-points of schooling at a most awkward intersection of social changes, state governance, and modernization agendas in rural ethnic China.