ABSTRACT
The Minhe County Monguor are an enclave of the larger Monguor (Tu) minority in China. Their experience with schooling illustrates a number of factors related to education in the Chinese countryside for minorities living far from an urban center. Their educational experience confronts such difficulties as a woefully inadequate education infrastructure; minimal financial support by the local government; low-quality teaching; high levels of historical illiteracy and poverty; and being taught in Chinese, a Sinitic language that is very different from their own Altaic one, for which a written form has never been used in education. Furthermore, we will examine the Monguor historical experience with formal education, and make suggestions as to how the present situation might be improved. In accomplishing this, we examine a number of related written records, present interviews from informants, and periodically call on the knowledge of the first author, who has taught in Minhe Monguor regions since 1987.
