(TibetanReview.net, Dec27, 2017) – China said Dec 25 that it was going to send a total of more than 10,000 teachers to Tibet Autonomous Region and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region ostensibly to improve education in these regions. But sending such a large number of Chinese teachers to ethnic minority regions could only mean one thing: to impose alien Chinese language and culture in the education of these peoples at the expense of their own distinct linguistic heritage and culture.
Under China’s so-called bilingual education system, children in ethnic minority regions are taught their own language only as a language subject, with all the other subjects being taught in Chinese language.
A group of exceptional teachers will be dispatched to Tibet and Xinjiang from other regions in China each year to guide and train local teachers and help upgrade the quality of local education, reported the official globaltimes.cn Dec 25, citing a plan posted by the Ministry of Education on its website that day.
The report said the first group of 4,000 teachers will be sent to the two regions in the spring of 2018, with each group staying there for about 18 months. They will reportedly be selected from high-quality elementary and high schools in provinces and cities such as Beijing, Tianjin and East China’s Shandong Province.
The ministry was cited as saying the teachers will provide a firm safeguard to the social economic development and peace in Tibet and Xinjiang, and foster qualified constructors and successors to the cause of socialism.
The report cited Chu Zhaohui, a researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences, as saying sending experienced teachers to Tibet and Xinjiang could help improve the education philosophy of local schools.
The current plan was stated to have been launched pursuant to a guideline for boosting the development of education in central and western regions released by the General Office of the State Council in Jun 2016. The guideline is said to stress the improvement of efforts to set up secondary school classes for ethnic minority students from Tibet and Xinjiang in other regions of China.
For this purpose, the guideline called for 30,000 teachers from other areas of China being dispatched to work in Tibet and Xinjiang by 2020, displacing over 90 percent of local science teachers, who will receive additional training apparently to be able to teach in Chinese.
