A Research Into The Localization Of The Secondary Vocational Education In Tibet

As a crucial force driving the modernization, the vocational education is an integral part of the modern education and plays an irreplaceable role in the economic development, employment promotion and improvement of the living standard. With the progression of the age, the modernization of the areas populated by the ethnic minorities has become an irretrievable trend, entailing their choice to popularize the vocational education as an efficient way to accelerate the local modernization. Judging from the structure of labor force, the ratio of values produced and the configuration of its GDP, Tibet remains in the transitional phase from the traditional industrial structure to the modern industrial structure that features a large surplus of labor force in the traditional economy of farming and livestock husbandry. Presently, the "Nine-Year Compulsory Education" has been executed all over the autonomous region of Tibet, and of the nearly50,000students graduating from the middle schools annually, only a tiny portion will enter the high school for a further study, leaving approximately74%to be the potential source for the vocational education. With the cultivation of the practical talents and the training of workers of preliminary and intermediate skills as its objective, the vocational education has its importance noticeably magnified in transforming the surplus labor force and the potential student source into an optimal human resource. Considering the part shouldered by the vocational education in promoting the local economy and stabilizing the society in the region of farming and livestock husbandry, the central and local governments have increased their investments in it, improved the system funding the students receiving the vocational education and expanded the subsidy coverage. Despite its rapid growth, the secondary vocational education in Tibet has slid into some awkward situations, such as the students’general poor academic performances, the low employment rate, the reluctance of the employing units to recognize the graduates’ knowledge and capability, etc. all of which contrast drastically and paradoxically with the continual, relatively high motivation of the students to study. Based on the fieldwork on the secondary vocational education in Tibet and a detailed review of the relevant literature, this research attributes the quality bottleneck to the schools’failure to provide the students with the type of education that can satisfy their needs. Sufficient heed has not been paid to the cultural differences when it comes to the design of educational content, the selection of teaching methodology, the design of programs available, the criteria of evaluation, etc, reducing the localization of the vocational education to an ambiguous self-positioning.Essentially speaking, the cause of the problem encountered by the secondary vocational education consists in schools themselves that are bureaucratized bodies characterized by the instrumental rationality. Instead of viewing each individual as a whole and organic system and pondering what on earth the education should mould the human nature into, the school education adopts the uniform mode to shape the students. Consequently, this research loans the theory of instrumental rationality and value rationality proposed by Max Weber to establish its own theoretical framework for explanation. From the perspective of value rationality, the school education fails to take into account the interests, hobbies, fortes, emotional factors of the students as well as the cultural traditions of the their own nation to satisfy their demands about education, causing them to lose their interest in knowledge and skills conveyed in books and through machines and subsequently influencing the study effects negatively. From the perspective of instrumental rationality, the education offered by the schools incline the students toward a conviction that the knowledge and skills they are learning cannot help to support their own living in the future, hence discouraging their motivation to study. Following this theoretical framework, this research conducts an investigation into the subjects involved by means of questionnaires and interviews:1) The random sampling method is adopted in combination with self-designed questionnaires, and the students in the following vocational schools are selected as research subjects. They are Shannan Vocational School, Shigatse Vocational School, Changdu Vocational School, the Vocational Education Center for County Dunlongdeqing and the Vocational Education Center for County Langkazi;2) In-depth interviews are conducted with students, the teaching staff and the employing units; additionally, the participant observation method is also employed on part of the sampled students to gain a close familiarity with their daily life and study, based on which the main problems about the vocational education in Tibet and their deeper causes are found.It is revealed by this empirical research that the learning efficiency of the students in the secondary vocational schools is low while the students in the entire learning process keep a relatively high motivation to study. Undoubtedly, the cause lies in the learning process. According to the statistic analysis, the students’ motivation to study are not affected by such factors as the gender, age, the education degree and occupation of their parents, the family income, etc. Contrarily, what functions as a shaping force of their motivation includes their religious belief, the school management, the teacher-student relationship, the teaching methodology, the content of textbooks, the design of programs available and so on. In the light of the regression analysis with the motivation to study as the dependent variable and the religious belief degree, school management, teacher-student relationship, teaching methodology, content of textbooks and design of programs available as independent variables, this research finds that these dependent variables are factors that intensely influence their motivation to study.In the learning process, the motivation to study activates, maintains and monitors their learning. Although students of all grades sustain a relatively high motivation to study, viewed vertically, students of lower grades harbor a higher motivation than those of higher grades, namely the motivation of students is in reverse proportion with the ascendance of their grades. The reason for this phenomenon is that students of lower grades have a high self-expectation when they just enter the school, but they gradually feel that the education offered there does not meet their needs as a consequence of the schools’ negligence of their different cultural background and the perverse implementation of the uniform mode of cultivation; and thus there arises the inconsistency between their motivation to study and the school arrangement, resulting in the students’ low self-efficacy for study, and in turn diminishing their initiative and self-confidence, weakening their motivation to study. Nevertheless, the students still keep a relatively intense motivation for study; if the education provided by the school can adjust to the students’ demands in the learning process, their performances are bound to be improved.Through the empirical research, the main conclusions of this thesis are as follows:(1) From the viewpoint of value rationality, the secondary vocational education in Tibet is incapable of satisfying students spiritually; from the viewpoint of instrumental rationality, it fails to provide them with a livelihood. It is not localized enough and does not offer the education that is customized in accordance with the peculiar cultural environment of Tibet.(2) During the entire learning process the students receiving the vocational education keep a relatively high motivation to study, but their results are unsatisfactory with a poor academic performance, a low employment rate, etc. The cause lies in the learning process. The education offered by the schools cannot meet the students’needs because the design of educational content, the selection of teaching methodology, the configuration of the teaching staff as well as the evaluation criteria do not take the cultural differences into consideration, namely the localization has not reached a sufficient extent to make the school education completely compatible with the traditional culture of their own nation.(3) In the unique cultural environment of Tibet, the secondary vocational education should regard as its priority the benefits of the Tibetan people and revere their traditional cultural ideology. Only based on that can it take a further step to discuss the economic contributions it can make. Ignoring the traditional cultural ideology, paying no attention to the education proper and into what exact talents it strives to mould the students, concentrating exclusively on making economic contributions, the secondary vocational education can never avoid the predicament of low learning efficiency.(4) The motivation of the students are associated with such factors as religious belief, school management, teacher-student relationship, teaching methodology, content of textbooks and design of programs available of majors. Thus, the secondary vocational education in Tibet cannot get out of its dilemma until the problem of localization is solved by satisfying the students spiritually from the perspective of value rationality and by meeting their survival requirements from the perspective of instrumental rationality.The potential contributions of this research lie in:(1) employing the mode of value rationality and instrumental rationality to explain the localization of the vocational education in the ethnic region of Tibet.(2) demonstrating that the design of educational content, selection of teaching methodology, configuration of teaching staff, design of programs available of majors and criteria of evaluation must be adapted to their traditional national culture and the regional economic structure if the secondary vocational education in Tibet wants to fulfill the localization, all of which is undertaken on the basis of the processing of the empirical data in a statistic fashion.