Lahu Girls' Education Choice

Based on the analysis of the whole process of the nine year compulsory education of 45 girl students of Lahu nationality realized by the revisit and restudy, the dissertation, under the frame of Cultural Reproduction Theory of ourdieu, explores the cultural reproduction of school education and the distinctiveness of the Lahu girls from the perspective of micro and macro educational ethnography, emic and etic of Culture Materialism, historical and field research.As the general rules of macro educational ethnography goes, the dissertation explores the education of the Lahu girls in the social, cultural, historical and education context. It not only makes the diachronic description and demonstration of the Lahu gils, but also did the synchronic analysis of their upward movement and regression entailed by modern school education. The revisit and restudy of the Lahu girls serves at best to reveal the inequity in education concealed in the process, and to demonstrate the phase characteristics and complexity of education towards ethnic minority girls while carrying the theme of equity from the beginning to the end.The dissertation takes the view that the object understanding of the school education can be achieved only when it is based on the anthropology participative observation and ethnography description against the social, economical and cultural context of the community due to their interdependence and interaction. Therefore, In the third chapter the cultural scenario of the Lahu is described in the dissertation, followed by their school education from the past to the present.The dissertation focuses on the transition of the Lahu girl from the uncivilized to the modern school girl and their separation along the educational process. In the forth chapter, it shows the cultural discontinuity, cultural conflict and cultural adaptation of the Lahu girl with the habitus acquired from the traditional community and the economic and cultural capital endowed by the family and community when they entered the school champs, which is also the process of the capital accumulation process of the Lahu girls. In the fifth chapter, it introduces the different educational choices of the adolescent Lahu girls in the modern school education featuring selection. Adolescence is the period when culture influence begins to take pace and the conflict between female identity and achievement-seeking is to form. The young age marriage and birth conventions in Lahu, the existing mercenary marriage and the academic barrier "justify" their different educational choices.In the sixth chapter, based on the gap between the ideal and the reality, describes the methods, process and possibility of the upward movement of 45 Lahu girls through education. It seeks to explore whether gender is a king of capital by applying Bourdieu's theory of practice for the explanation of the cultural reproduction in real education field. From the educational experiences of Lahu girls, it can be seen that gender is the driving force that cannot be ignored when the girls constructing their social space, and it embodies the intention of unique female identity which plays an important role in the objective structural institution, therefore, gender does possess the nature of capital.In the end, the dissertation summaries the problems within the Lahu girl class, and holds that there exists cultural reproduction in the modern school education which leads to social reproduction. The modern school, as the entry point of alien cultural should be closely related with the local ethnic minority community and family rather than "an island". The government should not only provide diverse choices for the ethnic minority group to meet their demand of integrating into the mainstream society, but also the local knowledge for their livelihood. To improve the quality of the girls, the knowledge in physiology, psychology, health and law are also needed.The significance of the dissertation lies in awakening people to pay more attention to the disadvantaged and reveal the inequity concealed in educational process. At the same time, it introduces the revisit and restudy methods of anthropology into educational research which bears great theoretic significance to education concerned with growth of human being.