Fabricating an Educational Miracle

Illustrates the changing significance of what it means to be educated, rural, and ethnic in Southwest China.

Winner of the 2017 American Educational Research Association's Division B Outstanding Book Recognition Award

Winner of the 2017 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award

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 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. Fabricating an Educational Miracle laces together complex accounts of how compulsory education produces dilemmas and possibilities in village schools in Southwest China. Drawing from interviews, participant observations, oral history, and archival research in a Miao and a Dong village-town in Qiandongnan Prefecture, Guizhou Province, this book examines the manifold and contradictory agendas that have captured rural ethnic schooling at a crossroads.