ABSTRACT
This chapter provides background on the education of ethnic minorities in China, as well as education in Tibet, and reviews the origin and development of boarding schools for Tibetan students. Ethnic minority education in developing countries, especially for girls, remains an urgent global challenge. The themes of reproduction and resistance that find utility in neo-Marxist studies of schooling throughout the world tap into the culturally bound logic of Tibetan households. Efforts to provide education for all are inevitably accompanied by national missions to 'civilize' minority peoples through boarding schools that dislocate children from their home communities. With the global trend in school privatization, there is also increasing space for ethnic minority communities to run their own schools in developed urban areas of the country, where they might also build surrounding communities with close links to the home communities that could transfer talent and cultural capital in both directions.
