Disenchantment revisited: school life in Northwest China

Abstract

ABSTRACT Typically understood through a universal-statist framework, modern schooling in contemporary China often contributes to the disenchantment of ethnic students. Based on year-long research in a Tibetan-serving secondary school, we provide additional insight in this discussion. We argue that to treat disenchantment as a fixed state ignores the space-temporal quality of human action. The school’s social process is multiple and momentary in nature and often undermines the seemingly linear educational programming. Under the rigid school setting emerge social spaces that expand beyond academic lessons. In those spaces, students continue to interact among themselves and with teachers, where withdrawal and marginalization happen alongside negotiation, appropriation, and participation. While disenchantment anchors the classroom experience of many, it interpenetrates and enmeshes with other aspects of student lives and is interwoven over time. By considering this complex interplay of disenchantment we upend the notion of disenchantment as a singular state, and illustrate this idea through two examples.