Minority Education

Mínzú jiàoyù 民族教育

Abstract: Educational attainment of China’s minority nationalities has been increasing overall,

but there is considerable variation among individual nationalities. Beyond assuring equity in

attainment, a major challenge is how to reflect the knowledge perspectives, culture, and

languages of minority nationalities, while insuring that students learn the national curriculum and

the Chinese language. Accordingly, multicultural education and various models of bilingual

education are being considered as means to provide quality minority education.

Approximately 100 million people in China (about 10 percent of the population) belong to

minority nationalities. Clearly, minority education in China has enormous significance. Current

important issues in minority education in China include quantitative developments in educational

access and survival among China’s minority groups, and qualitative issues that are relevant to all

stakeholders—not least of which are the minority learners and communities themselves—that

focus on the role of minority culture and languages in China’s minority education.

Comprehensive works on minority-education theory in China (Teng and Weng 2001;

Wang 2002) argue that minority education is necessarily interdisciplinary, requiring the

application of insights, principles, and research methods from diverse fields such as

anthropology, in addition to education. Notwithstanding these arguments, minority-education

policy and practice range considerably.

Significant economic, geographic, and sociocultural difficulties present challenges to

achieving the international initiative Education for All and the United Nation’s Millennium

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Development Goals for Education in China’s minority areas. In the past equality of education

has been understood largely in quantitative terms, as equality of access, survival, output, and

outcome. In recent years, however, the discussion about equality has expanded to hold that

education must be acceptable and adaptable to marginal populations.

Access and Attainment

According to percentages calculated from census data, 84 percent of the minority population in

China had completed primary education in 2000. For more recent age cohorts, near-universal

primary education (above 90 percent) has been accomplished, along with a reduction of the

gender gap to nearly zero. Completion rates for junior secondary school is rising quickly also,

especially among females, with over 60 percent of males and females in recent cohorts

completing basic education, compared to only a 39 percent completion rate in 2000. If these

trends persist, more females than males will have completed nine years of compulsory education

by the next census. At the senior secondary education level, 11.6 percent of the minority

population (13.1 percent for males; 10.0 percent for females) graduated in 2000. Recent senior

secondary completion rates approach 20 percent for both genders, however, and are increasing

more rapidly for females, such that the female completion rate is soon likely to surpass the male

rate. A total of 2.7 percent of the minority population had completed some form of

postsecondary education in 2000 (3.2 percent for males; 2.2 percent for females). Postsecondary

attainment among the most recent cohorts is approaching 6 percent for both genders, with the

female rate of increase greater than the male rate (CDC 2000).

Strategies for Success

Notwithstanding these overall increases, enormous differences exist among nationalities. For

example, mean minority tertiary attainment has been rising and reached a national average of 3.7

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percent in 2000. For eight minority nationalities, however, tertiary attainment was more than

double this average; for twenty-five others it was less than half the national mean, while tertiary

attainment actually fell for six minority groups in this period (Bahry 2011). In other words,

several minority nationalities were well on the way to mass higher education in 2000 (defined as

completion rates of more than 15 percent) and others were moving toward that goal, but a small

number experienced decline from 1990 to 2000.

Quality Schooling

Rural and minority schools can be strengthened by developing local capacity, training teachers

from the community, and developing locally adapted curriculum. This is the case in innovative,

non-formal community schools in many rural, developing, and indigenous environments (Farrell

2008). Gaps in the perceived quality of rural minority education in China, however, sometimes

have been addressed instead by closing village schools, consolidating them with junior

secondary schools in towns, and raising qualifications for teachers (Ba and Teng 2007). (Two

major US rural-education literature reviews find little educational benefit from school

consolidation. For a review of quantitative studies see Arnold, Newman, Gaddy, and Dean 2005;

for a review of qualitative research see Kannapel and DeYoung 1999.)

Such measures, of course, treat local characteristics as a matter of deficit rather than

difference. From an urban perspective, removing children from rural, minority-language

environments is seen as ensuring quality in education. Nevertheless, growing international

consensus argues that using boarding schools to adapt minority children to mainstream society

weakens their link with home and their communities, and impacts negatively on student identity

and the intergenerational transmission of minority language and culture (Corson 1999).

Discussion has begun on the consequences of this approach for children’s physical and

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emotional development and well-being. Some have critiqued boarding schools’ ability to support

children’s physical and emotional development adequately, with reports that some minority

children are dissatisfied with living conditions and homesick enough to run away and return

home. On the other hand, dropout rates are reportedly lower among minority students who live

together in “student houses” and are cared for by adult volunteers from their community (Ba and

Teng 2007; Qian 2007), an example of community-based initiative to increase the acceptability

of schooling.

Although local boarding schools are more numerous, research studies devote more

attention to “inland” (nèidì 内地) boarding schools where minority students from western

regions study in Chinese-dominant regions. These schools rely on Chinese linguistic and cultural

immersion to develop a modern minority elite able to contribute to local development in their

districts. Students in these programs engage in a complex development of identity and social

capital, and achieve a much higher Chinese proficiency than they otherwise would have, but

develop relatively limited mother-tongue literacy that may limit their employment prospects

when they return to their home districts (Chen 2008; Postiglione, Jiao, and Manlaji 2007; Zhu

2007).

Curriculum Design

The Ministry of Education (MOE) has noted that the content of the centrally planned national

curriculum and textbooks are distant from the experience of most children in China, and as a

result do not sufficiently engage students’ prior knowledge or reflect their lives, interests, and

experience. In order to increase relevance, engagement, and learning, curriculum has been

divided into three types—national, local, and school-based. Currently, together with practice

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activities, 16–20 percent of instructional time is allotted for activities that are not derived from

the national curriculum (Zhou and Zhu 2007).

These policies approximate the traditional discretion in minority education to adjust

national curriculum to local conditions (yīndìzhìyí 因地制宜), and are clearly beneficial to

minority education. Some minority-district education bureaus, though, have a cautious attitude to

these reforms and neither encourage nor discourage schools from participating (Bahry 2009, 78).

Some minority district schools have developed school-based curriculum, however: teachers in

one school produced school-based textbooks in Chinese on local geography and on minority

history and culture, arguing that minority cultural content was intrinsically motivating and an

important supplement to national curriculum (Bahry 2009).

Multicultural Education

Minority-education researchers in China are turning to multicultural education as a means of

enhancing the learning of minority students and meeting the twin goals of learning national

curriculum and transmitting minority culture. Some scholars discuss the need for multicultural

education and local curriculum content as a countermeasure to curriculum imbalance in minority

education (Teng and Guan 2007), while others examine the relevance of multicultural education

in other countries––particularly in Canada and the United States––to China’s minority education

challenges (Wang and Wan 2006).

Some multicultural education models are, like the local minority-culture textbooks

mentioned above, delivered monolingually through the dominant language. While such models

may satisfy minorities without their own language, for linguistic minorities, exclusive dominant-

language education may be insufficient. There are models of multicultural education

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incorporating bilingual instruction (Baker 2011; Nieto 2001); however, these have received little

attention in the literature from China.

Language and Instruction

Language policy can be characterized as taking a tolerance, permission, or promotion stance

toward use of a language or languages. Within China, language policy has shifted from the

minority-language promotion approach taken after 1949 to a stance of minority-language

permission coupled with strong Chinese-language promotion in the twenty-first century (Zhou

and Sun 2004). Accordingly, some have argued for a language-in-education policy that promotes

both Chinese and minority languages in schools in a balanced way (Badeng 2001; Feng 2007).

This implies the need for a strong form of maintenance bilingual education (when exposure to

the home language is extended for a longer time after instruction switches to the second

language) with the goal of additive bilingualism (when learning the second language doesn’t

interfere with learning the native language) (Baker 2011; Cummins 2001; May 2008).

An important question concerns the criteria by which a language-in-education model can

be termed bilingual education. As used in international scholarship, “bilingual education” refers

to a language-in-education model where two languages are both used as the language of

instruction (LOI) for curriculum content. Teaching all content in one language, while providing a

single course in a second language without using that language as LOI for other content, does not

constitute bilingual education in these terms. (For models of bilingual education see Baker 2011;

for research evidence supporting bilingual education see May 2008; for language-in-education

models in China see Bahry, Darkhor, and Jia Luo, 113.)

The Chinese term “two-language education” (shuāngyǔ jiàoyù 双语教育), however, is

used often in educational contexts where two languages are involved in some way, without

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necessarily having two languages of instruction. Indeed, twenty-six different uses of “shuāngyǔ

jiàoyù” have been identified in the literature (Jia 2003). The term that corresponds more closely

to the English “bilingual education” is “two-language instruction” (shuāngyǔ jiàoxúe 双语教学).

As defined by the international academic community, then, teaching models that are

mother-tongue dominant (mŭyŭ wéizhŭ 母语为主) or Chinese-dominant (hànyŭ wéizhŭ 汉语为

主) are both monolingual education models. Similarly, “transitional bilingual education” refers

in the international literature to an education model in which native language (L1) and second

language (L2) are both used as LOI, with L1 use gradually decreasing over time until L2

becomes the exclusive LOI (Baker 2011). The abrupt shift in some districts in China from

monolingual L1 to monolingual L2 education without an intervening period with two LOIs

(Blachford 1999) is not transitional bilingual education in that sense. The recent shift in

minority-education policy in Xinjiang from minority-dominant LOI toward Chinese-dominant

LOI (though taught by bilingual minority teachers) (Ma 2009; Strawbridge 2008) is thus a shift

from L1 monolingual instruction to L2 monolingual instruction (Ba and Teng 2007).

Models with Chinese-dominant instruction and two LOIs have both been termed in some

English language reports as “bilingual education.” This blurring of the conceptual boundary

between models in which two languages are merely present in the environment, and models in

which two languages play an educational role as languages of instruction, is responsible for

much confusion in discussions of language-in-education models in China. (In the international

literature, “transitional bilingual education” refers to a form of education in which the use of L1

as the LOI gradually decreases over a period of several years, until L2 becomes the exclusive

LOI (Baker 2011). While many scholars in China argue for such a gradual transition, in practice,

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local officials may opt for an abrupt transition from L1 to L2 without an intervening period using

both languages as the LOI.)

Concerns over inadequate teaching of Chinese as a second language has led to uncritical

recourse to popular myths that “younger is best” and that language learning requires a “language

environment.” This thinking, when applied by officials without expertise in second-language

acquisition and coupled with prioritization of Chinese over the mother tongue, leads to local

policies that replace mother-tongue instruction with Chinese instruction, or shift to Chinese-

dominant LOI at progressively younger ages, or send children to boarding schools in local towns

or cities where Chinese language and culture predominate (Ba and Teng 2007; Blachford 1999;

Strawbridge 2008). A few jurisdictions, however, are attempting a balance between two

languages as LOI.

Dual-language maintenance bilingual instruction, involving speakers of minority

languages and the dominant language both learning bilingually in their own and each other’s

languages, has been found to contribute to developing literacy and linguistic proficiency in two

languages at a higher level than monolingual education in either language, as well as increasing

achievement and reducing dropout (Baker 2011; May 2008). Mutual learning of Chinese and

local minority-nationality languages has long been officially encouraged in China for officials

and teachers. In the 1950s, majority-ethnicity educators were given training in the languages of

the nationalities they were assigned to teach. This policy went into abeyance during the Cultural

Revolution, however, and although it was officially revived in the 1980s (Teng and Weng 2001;

Wang 2002; Zhou and Sun 2004), few non-minority officials or teachers learn local minority

languages today (Blachford 1999). Nevertheless, rural Han in minority areas may develop

varying degrees of oral proficiency in local minority languages (Hansen 2005) and may support

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their children learning a minority language in school. Indeed, in one minority district, a Han

parent argued that non-minority children learning the local minority language at school could

serve to reduce communication barriers between nationalities. In the same district, minority

parents expressed a desire for their children to learn minority, national, and international content

in schools, as well as the mother tongue, Chinese, and even a foreign language (Bahry 2009). Of

course, language-in-education policies and the relationship of minority-language communities to

schools have long been seen as playing a role both in subtractive bilingualism, language shift,

and language endangerment, as well as additive bilingualism and mother-tongue maintenance

(Fishman 1991). Increasing attention is being paid to language endangerment in China, and the

role of language policy and planning in supporting minority-language maintenance (Bradley

2005).

Given these factors, there may be considerable demand and potential for additive

bilingualism through bilingual maintenance education or even dual-language enrichment

bilingual education in China’s minority districts. (See Baker 2011 and Cummins 2001 for a

discussion of the distinction between additive and subtractive bilingualism.) What is needed are

models of bilingual (and even multilingual) education that eschew either-or choices between

mother tongue and a language of wider communication (Cummins 2001; May 2008). Barriers to

implementing maintenance bilingual education, and more specifically dual-language

maintenance bilingual education, are largely due to lack of awareness of the existence of such

models and their theoretical and empirical support. But the barriers are also partly due to these

models not fitting the preconceptions of educators, researchers, officials, and policy makers

about the nature of language, bilingualism, language learning, and teaching.

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Conceptualizing Quality

Recent MOE reforms calling for a change from “examination-based education” (yìngshì jiàoyù

应试教育) to “education for essential qualities” (sùzhì jiàoyù 素质教育) and the establishment

of three levels of curriculum authority at the national, local, and school level are explained in

basically interactionist, constructivist terms (Zhou and Zhu 2007). (Interactionist is a small-scale

perspective of social interaction—e.g., interaction between individuals, small groups, etc.

Constructivist refers to the theory that individuals create new knowledge from their experiences.)

Two things are noteworthy about these reforms and associated literature: (1) the general

constructivist critique of centralized curriculum taught in a top-down teacher-centered fashion

applies equally strongly to minority education and general education, and (2) this literature does

not refer to the particular case of minority education and the special problems created for

minority communities, cultures, and languages by a transmission approach to education.

The debate about the utility of reified centralized urban knowledge for the mass of

Chinese students, who are mainly rural, is familiar to Chinese educators and reminiscent of

earlier critiques of the impracticality of book learning during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. What

is needed is a rigorous analysis of the theoretical and practical implications of various Chinese

educational traditions, theories, policies, and practices. Also needed is analysis of their relation

to external theories, policies, and practices—not only to those of the West, but also to those of

the Soviet Union, which greatly informed the development of China’s minority education after

1949.

It follows that increased communication is needed among researchers, curriculum

developers, and policy makers in order to broaden and deepen dialogue, explore issues of mutual

concern, and establish the ways in which quality minority education is a particular example of

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general principles of quality in education, and the ways in which it exhibits special concerns.

This will require conceptualizing the aims of education and investigating the ways in which

educational quality is affected by the perspectives of all stakeholders, particularly those most

affected by the educational process—students, their families, and their communities.

Determination of appropriate content, activities, pedagogy, and language of instruction,

according to the Tyler model of curriculum, must all follow the determination of the aims and

objectives of education. The ultimate aims of minority education, however, are exactly where

there is often a lack of consensus in policy and practice, and among stakeholders. Many

decisions about minority education are driven by political aims of developing stability in

minority areas and strengthening interethnic solidarity, and by economic aims of providing

conditions that support development. As a consequence, minority-education policy and practice

may be led by noneducational considerations and not sufficiently informed by educational

criteria.

At the same time, policy recommendations from education researchers also may fail to

adequately consider quality perspectives of those stakeholders most closely affected by minority

education: minority children, parents, and communities. In order to do so, increased research and

investment—and a stronger relation between researchers, communities, educators, policy makers

and officials—is needed.

Ultimately, the debate centers on the place of minority identity within a broader Chinese

identity (Clothey 2005; Feng 2007). The pan-Chinese nationality (Zhōnghuà mínzú 中华民族),

conceptualized as exhibiting a structure of duōyuán yītǐ 多元一体 (both diversity and unity) is

interpreted by some as rónghé 融合 (fusion)—where diverse minority characteristics contribute

characteristics to the whole, but as in a melting pot, gradually disappear—and by others as a

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flower garden, where these characteristics contribute to a harmonious whole but preserve

individuality, as in the mosaic image (mǎsàikè 马赛克) of multicultural identity (Wang and Wan

2006). This process involves consideration of the proper role of local knowledge, culture, and

language in educational practice, policy, and research (Yang 2006).

If all stakeholders are to consider education in minority districts first-rate, the

perspectives of all stakeholders—but particularly those of minority students, parents, and

communities—on the aims of education, and what constitutes quality in education, must be taken

into account (Cummins 2001). Accordingly, the essential qualities in policy, practice, and

research of acceptability and adaptability are more and more a feature of minority education in

China, and around the world.

Stephen A. BAHRY

University of Toronto, Canada

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