Sending children to the interior cities and enabling them a promising future – a qualitative study of Tibetan parents’ educational decisions

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the complexities behind the educational decisions of Tibetan parents on sending their children to the interior cities for dislocated secondary education. Drawing on qualitative data through multiple methods, we find that their educational decisions are driven both by a rational calculation of the benefits and costs and by a moralised ideology of good parenting. Educational opportunities are prioritised over ethnic cultural learning in parents’ decisions. However, parents hope their children will make up for this loss at a later life stage, at college and work. Parents’ temporary compromises reflect their positioning of priorities at different life stages. This study offers a new lens to understand the politics of dislocated schooling in China from ethnic minority parents’ perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Interior Tibet Class
• educational decisions
• parent
• future
• morality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 http://www.tibet.cn/cn/index/edu/201901/t20190121_6484772.html

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42071183), National Social Science Foundation (15CSH039), the Multicultural Center at Sichuan Normal University (DYWH1702), and National Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (2019A1515012102) and Guangzhou City (202002030282).