Fabricating an Educational Miracle

<p><b>Illustrates the changing significance of what it means to be educated, rural, and ethnic in Southwest China.</b></p><p><b>Winner of the 2017 American Educational Research Association's Division B Outstanding Book Recognition Award </b></p><p><b>Winner of the 2017 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award </b></p><p>In today's China, education is translated into both acute social desires and profound disenchantment. Shanghai's stellar performance in the recent Program for International Student Assessment paints a celebratory image of educational success yet tells only a partial story. For many in rural China who are schooled yet prepared only for factory sweatshops, education remains an elusive ideal and offers a hollowed promise of social mobility. <i>Fabricating an Educational Miracle</i> laces together complex accounts of how compulsory education produces dilemmas and possibilities in village schools in Southwest China. Drawing from interviews, participant observations, oral history, and archival research in a Miao and a Dong village-town in Qiandongnan Prefecture, Guizhou Province, this book examines the manifold and contradictory agendas that have captured rural ethnic schooling at a crossroads.</p>