From Aspiration to Participation: Confusions and Struggles in a Time of Transition

Abstract

While state schooling strives to construct an educated identity for enrolled Muslim Hui students and discipline them to follow appropriate, civilized behaviors, it also creates a generational gap between Muslim Hui students and their parents. Comparing to their children attending school at age seven, the majority of Muslim Hui parents have not gone to school or only received a few years of state schooling. As Muslim Hui students are being acculturated to learning activities and what is believed to be good quality education, their parents find it difficult to comprehend. “We are just farmers, and we don’t know anything about schooling” is a commonly heard expression from these parents who exhibit helplessness and frustration when being asked by the school to participate collaboratively in educating their children. Since farming and raising livestock have kept many of them busy in the field, they hardly have time to pay attention to their children’s education. The only time they encounter the school is when they deliver bedding and daily supplies to their children at the beginning of the semester, when they pick children up to go home on weekends at the gate, when they are phoned by teachers to settle issues of their children being in trouble or involved in violent incidents, and when they are asked to attend parents meeting once per semester. Few of them have ever talked to a teacher about their children, and the majority have no knowledge of what subjects are being taught at school.