Learning to love the motherland: educating Tibetans in China

A major goal of education for Tibetans, as for all China's ‘minority nationalities’, has been to encourage patriotism towards China and to foster a sense of nationhood. This paper considers the ways in which this priority has conditioned the schooling of Tibetans since 1950. Although this priority is unchanging, the paper looks at how it varies in degree and content as political leaders or policies change. An analysis of the primary curriculum reveals the process whereby Tibetan ethnicity is recreated through selective rendering of elements of Tibetan culture, history and religion to reposition it in the Chinese national context. It argues that while in central China the ideological content of the curriculum may have diminished with economic development, in Tibet, as in other border regions, the particular blend of patriotic and moral education is likely to continue as long as the Chinese state feels threatened by outside cultural and political influences.