6 - “They Think We Don't Value Schooling”: Paradoxes of Education in the Multi-Ethnic Central Highlands of Vietnam

Summary

Based on a sociological survey and ethnographic field research conducted in 2005 in Đắk Nông Province, this chapter places education at the intersection of ethnicity and class in Vietnam's Central Highlands, a region that not only integrates with national and global markets, but also hosts intensified interaction between indigenous peoples and multi-ethnic migrants. Examination of two prime agents in education — teachers and parents — and their views of education and of one another — reveals that instead of being a site of cultural transmission or a meritocratic springboard for upward mobility, schools in this multi-ethnic setting reproduce existing structural inequalities among ethnic groups.

Following a brief introduction to Đắk Nông province and its education system, I detail the ways in which teachers and parents there perceive and talk about themselves and each other and the kinds of expectations parents have for their children. By identifying areas of convergence as well as disagreement among the concerns of and about teachers, I suggest that parents and educators are not communicating effectively and, in fact, are not engaged in a genuine dialogue. The missing dialogue between these two groups of education agents, I contend, stems from a more fundamental distance between indigenous residents and migrants that is in turn rooted in the recent history of the local political economy.

This chapter also links M'Nông's schooling outcomes with their social mobility, or lack thereof. As discussed by M'Nông parents and observed through ethnographic fieldwork, the paradox of centralized examinations and diploma-based recruiting policy of local enterprises is complicated by on-site ethnic tensions. I argue that the existing mode of education not only fails to transform interlocking ethnic class divisions, but breeds exclusion, as is seen in the failures of schools to produce M'Nông graduates to fill a wide range of jobs that are increasingly available in the fast industrializing local economy. The chapter shows how ethnic and class relations shape schooling outcomes and how education is a social field in which differences and inequalities are lived and felt.