Schooling away from home

On nation-states, America's Indian boarding schools, and how China's government treats the people of Tibet

A recent episode of the "Drum Tower" podcast from The Economist addresses the phenomenon of official Chinese government-run boarding schools in Tibet. The place of Tibet within the modern state of China is a fraught question already -- Tibet has many of the marks of a distinct "nation", in the sense of having a recognizable culture, with religious and linguistic characteristics that are different from their neighbors. But Tibet isn't a nation-state, since it doesn't get to govern itself (as anyone familiar with the rallying cry "Free Tibet" is already aware).

■ As the podcast reports, the Chinese government has been engaged in a campaign to build boarding schools in Tibet and to fill them using coercive techniques. The schools, notably, are taught in Mandarin rather than Tibetan.

■ Children are enrolled in the boarding schools from kindergarten age -- which means that in many cases, they begin immersion in a language other than the one spoken at home from the very beginning of their literate ages. A charitable argument would suggest that learning Mandarin is a key way to unlock future economic potential within the broader Chinese state.

■ The less charitable interpretation is that by displacing and undermining the children's home language from a tender young age, the Chinese government is pursuing an agenda to cleave the children away from their family and ethnic identities. It's a familiar model: The American and Canadian governments are being held to account for the culturally devastating practice of sending American Indian/First Nations children to boarding schools in order to force them to undergo assimilation.

■ Parents have a strong instinct to consent to whatever appears to be in the long-term best interests of their children, even when that is in tension with what appears to be in the interests of the family unit. That's what makes the practice so sinister, in effectively forcing families to choose a practice to surrender their links to their children in exchange for the likely best hope for their children to have economic opportunities in the future. It's a cruel way to subjugate a people.