Rural Schooling and Good Life in Late Socialist Laos

Drawing on ethnographic research in northern Laos, this article analyses articulations of a good life in primary school textbook imagery and how this resonates with everyday life in rural upland communities. This is contrasted with children’s sketches of a good life found in the classrooms and ethnographic accounts of moments of ‘good time’ in the context of rural schooling. It is argued that these latter moments constitute brief instances of a good life in the present. Given the deeply hierarchical power relations in which rural education is embedded, not all of these good times stay good for very long. This is reflective of the condition of late socialism in rural areas.

Paying for Progress: School Taxes, Municipal Government, and Liberal State Building, Cuetzalan and Huehuetla, Mexico, 1876–1930

Focusing on school funding, this article examines the relationship between the majority indigenous population of the Puebla Sierra and the Mexican state from 1876 to 1930. The article questions assumptions about peasant resistance to taxes and about the dearth of rural schooling before 1921. I find that the municipal personal taxes that funded education during the Porfiriato were raised continually in spite of the fact that they burdened the poor disproportionately. Acquiescence to taxation administered by local authorities was further demonstrated when personal taxes were abolished in 1917 and municipalities resuscitated a Porfirian-era education tax in order to maintain schools that state and federal governments would not pay for—a fact ignored by the historiography, which has focused on federal schools. This article argues that municipalities contributed to the emergent educational system and that school funding helped to construct an economically unequal liberal citizenship in which the price for inclusion could be high.

A Middle-class Farming Family Negotiates “the Rural School Problem” in Interwar Australia

Rural schooling was a site of educational and social tensions, and the one-room government school was viewed as pedagogically traditional in interwar Australia. Given this context, this article explores the decision-making and educational practices of a white middle-class family in 1930s Western Australia. Former kindergarten teacher Marjorie Caw, her husband, Alf, and their two children lived on a sheep-wheat farm ten kilometres from a one-room school. Convinced that private rather than government schools were progressive, Marjorie supplied the children with their elementary education at home, sometimes resorting to correspondence lessons from the Western Australian education department, and sent them to urban private boarding schools for secondary education. The article canvasses dilemmas this created for her as a teacher and mother and argues that the Caw children’s experiences demonstrated a more complex and less dichotomous situation regarding “the rural school problem” and progressive education in the interwar years than is typically recognized in the literature. Résumé Dans l’Australie de l’entre-deux-guerres, l’enseignement en milieu rural était marqué par des tensions éducatives et sociales, alors que les écoles publiques d’une seule pièce étaient considérées comme une tradition pédagogique. Dans ce contexte, cet article explore les choix et les pratiques en matière d’éducation d’une famille blanche de la classe moyenne dans l’Australie-Occidentale des années 1930. Ancienne éducatrice à la maternelle, Marjorie Caw, son mari Alf et leurs deux enfants vivaient sur une ferme alliant la culture du blé et l’élevage des brebis à dix kilomètres d’une école d’une pièce. Convaincue que les écoles privées étaient plus progressistes que les écoles publiques, Marjorie fournissait aux enfants une éducation élémentaire à la maison, recourant parfois aux cours par correspondance du département de l’éducation de l’Australie-Occidentale, et les envoyait recevoir leur éducation secondaire dans des pensionnats privés urbains. L’article aborde les dilemmes que ces décisions ont engendrés pour elle en tant qu’enseignante et mère, et démontre que l’éducation des enfants de Majorie Caw a été vécue dans un contexte plus complexe que le suggère la dichotomie entre le « problème de l’école rurale » et l’éducation progressiste dans l’entre-deux-guerres.

Rural education across China’s 40 years of reform: past successes and future challenges

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe the policy and trends in rural education in China over the past 40 years; and also discuss a number of challenges that are faced by China’s rural school system. Design/methodology/approach The authors use secondary data on policies and trends over the past 40 years for preschool, primary/junior high school, and high school. Findings The trends over the past 40 years in all areas of rural schooling have been continually upward and strong. While only a low share of rural children attended preschool in the 1980s, by 2014 more than 90 percent of rural children were attending. The biggest achievement in compulsory education is that the rise in the number of primary students that finish grade 6 and matriculate to junior high school. There also was a steep rise of those going to and completing high school. While the successes in upscaling rural education are absolutely unprecedented, there are still challenges. Research limitations/implications This is descriptive analysis and there is not causal link established between policies and rural schooling outcomes. Practical implications The authors illustrate one of the most rapid rises of rural education in history and match the achievements up with the policy efforts of the government. The authors also explore policy priorities that will be needed in the coming years to raise the quality of schooling. Originality/value This is the first paper that documents both the policies and the empirical trends of the success that China has created in building rural education from preschool to high school during the first 40 years of reform (1978-2018). The paper also documents – drawing on the literature and the own research – the achievements and challenges that China still face in the coming years, including issues of gender, urbanization, early childhood education and health and nutrition of students.

Families Without Schools: Rurality, Correspondence Education, and the Promise of Schooling in Interwar Western Canada

Using a collection of settler family letters to the Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in British Columbia, the first provincial government–supported “schooling by mail” arrangement of its kind in Canada, I highlight the efforts of rural families to secure an education for their children in the period between the First and Second World Wars. The settler families who took advantage of correspondence schooling did so without the benefit of a professional teacher or a dedicated schoolhouse. This arrangement proved onerous for many settler families. In their letters to the ECS, adults and young people articulated the belief that the provincial government needed to do more to provide educational services for them. Families were acutely aware of their contributions to the prosperity of the province and, in return, they demanded schools for their children. Given the unique perspectives reflected through this collection of letters, my examination is situated in the interstices between rural schooling and correspondence schooling.

Endogenous schooling, school proximity and returns to rural schooling in Northwestern China

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to estimate the returns to rural schooling in China, addressing both endogeneity in rural individuals’ schooling and self-selection into off-farm work. Design/methodology/approach This paper exploits geographical proximity to rural secondary schools to create instrumental variables (IV) for individuals’ years of schooling. It addresses both endogenous schooling and self-selection using the two-step procedure developed in Wooldridge (2002, p. 586). Findings The preferred IV estimate of schooling returns, 7.6 percent, is considerably higher than most previous estimates found in rural China. Originality/value This paper is among the few papers that examine returns to rural schooling in China while simultaneously addressing both endogeneity in individuals’ schooling and self-selection into off-farm work. Its findings suggest that rural education in China is potentially able to generate a respectable level of economic returns if policies are designed to provide greater school accessibility to rural individuals.