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![]() ![]() Introduction China has a great tradition of education. Education was not only regarded as a noble virtue but for a very long time the recruitment of the highly esteemed government officials depended solely on the education of an applicant and not on his birth. During the Cultural Revolution teachers and academics were defiled as "intellectuals" and education was denigrated, yet today again the People's Republic of China (PRC) acknowledges the importance of education for a child's personal growth and for the development of the society. Since 1976 the PRC has made great investments in the field of education and the educational standard of the Chinese people has risen considerably. For the Tibetan children who are the subject of this study, education has a particular importance. Economically, Tibetans cannot compete with the estimated 7.5 million Chinese settlers in Tibet. Chinese authorities provide Chinese with substantial financial and social benefits to encourage them to settle in Tibet, including high wages, long holidays, housing, health services and educational opportunities.The successful encouragement of Chinese immigrants means that today the Tibetan population represents a minority in their own country. The implications of China's population transfer policy for Tibet are profound. Tibetans' strong religious traditions are in danger of being totally suppressed by a communist government which regards religion as harmful, suspects Tibetan Buddhists of "splitting the motherland" and considers the Dalai Lama, Tibet's religious and secular leader, a "criminal". As Tibetans become more and more marginalised their ancient and unique culture is threatened with extinction as gradually their language, their history and their folk customs are superimposed with those of Chinese. For these reasons, Tibetan children's right to education and the protection of their minority rights plays a decisive role in Tibet's future. Education must not only be available to Tibetan children, it must also satisfy their right to receive instruction on Tibet-related subjects and in Tibetan language. Tibet has been illegally occupied by China since 1949 and is currently administered by the authorities of the PRC. By signing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the PRC is bound to provide the Tibetan children with an education which is consistent with the obligations of the CRC. This report focuses on, but does not confine itself to, the rights embodied in articles 28 and 29 of the CRC - the specific rights to education. It became apparent in the course of researching education in Tibet that other rights covered in the CRC were also being violated. These rights have also therefore been referred to in this report as they were considered to be part of a broader concept of "education", the violation of which was being implemented via the educational system. The principal part of this report is based on testimonial gathered in interviews conducted in Spring 1997 with 50 Tibetan children who had fled from Tibet in the previous two or three years and are now living in northern India. The children interviewed were not pre-chosen in any way and all were asked the same set of questions (see Appendix II). Selected interviews have been reproduced in full in Appendix III, but for reasons of security the names of all children interviewed have been withheld. Several factors mean that our study was necessarily limited: the limited number of children interviewed, the impossibility of accessing school children in Tibet, the young age of the interviewees and their potential subjectivity. Nonetheless, the testimonial is largely supported by reports compiled by other sources on the poor state of education in Tibet. Moreover, the fact that 96% of the children interviewed had fled Tibet for reasons of education, generally under the most hazardous conditions and at great financial and personal cost to their family, indicates Tibetans' enormous dissatisfaction with the manner in which their children are being educated. Interestingly too, children from many different parts of Tibet reported a largely similar educational situation and the violations referred to appeared to be common and widespread.
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