Events

The Politics of Compulsory Education: Universal Ideals and Local Disenchantment in Southwest China

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Date:

5 Aug 2015

Time:

12:00 – 13:30

Venue:

USC, 8/F, Tin Ka Ping Building, CUHK

Speaker(s):

Jinting WUAssistant Professor, the University of Macau

Biography of Speaker:

Jinting Wu is Assistant Professor of Education Policy at the University of Macau. She received her PhD with a joint degree in Educational Policy Studies and Curriculum and Instruction, and a minor in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Luxembourg, also a recipient of the 2013 Gail P. Kelly Outstanding Dissertation Award in Comparative Education. Her research interests include comparative, international, and global studies of education, anthropology of education, transnational curriculum inquiry, educational theory and philosophy, and qualitative research methods. She is the author of Fabricating an Educational Miracle: Compulsory Schooling Meets Ethnic Rural Development in Southwest China, forthcoming with the State University of New York Press.

Admission:

Please email or call the USC office before 10:00am on every seminar day. Thank you.

Enquiries:

Tel.: (852) 3943-8763/8765
Email: event@usc.cuhk.edu.hk

Event Details:

Language: English/Chinese
Lunch Fee: Free Admission, HK$20.00 for Lunch

Synopsis of Lecture:

In today’s China, education is translated into both acute social desires and profound disenchantment. Shanghai’s stellar performance in the recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) paints a celebratory image of educational success yet tells only a partial story. For many in rural China who are schooled yet prepared only for factory sweatshops, education remains an elusive ideal and offers a hollowed promise of social mobility. Drawing from interviews, participant observations, oral history, and archival research in a Miao and a Dong village-town in Qiandongnan Prefecture, Guizhou Province, this paper examines the unintended consequences of the state’s compulsory education policy commonly known as the Two Basics Project (TBP 兩基工程). The paper further explores how the official policy’s one-size-fits-all criteria of educability jar with the Miao and the Dong ethnic people’s rich cosmologies and notions of the “educated person.” The chapter questions the very “progressive” ideals in China’s educational agenda, and challenges binaries such as literacy/illiteracy, cultured/uncultured, modernity/traditionalism.

Remarks:

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