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Education in Litang County

by Pamela Logan

July 31, 2001

Today I arrived in Litang for the annual Litang Horse-Racing Festival, which this year has drawn a remarkable number of foreign visitors. I came here with Mike Dotson, who is sponsoring six children at the junior middle school. We are therefore being hosted by the school. They have prepared a Tibetan tent for Mike to stay in on the fairgrounds, and I'm staying in the home of Gele, who heads the education bureau, and his family.

At our welcoming dinner, Gele gave some facts and figures that indicate what huge obstacles he faces in bringing education to the people of Litang. To start with, the county has 14,000 square kilometers of land and a population of 49,500. That means an average density of 3.3 persons per square kilometer. (and if you subtract the county seat, the density is probably half that).

Roughly ten per cent of this population is school-age, which means one child for every three square kilometers. With such a widely disbursed population, how can the government bring education to Litang's children? It would be a big challenge even in a rich country. It's therefore not surprising that only 2800 out of 4950 school-age children are actually in school. This situation is not at all unique to Litang, but is prevalent over most of the Tibetan plateau.

The second major obstacle to education is poverty. The average per capita income in Litang county is 590 yuan per year. That's less than US$100. With primary school tuition running at 600 yuan, it's clearly impossible for many families to afford an education for their children. And that's assuming that school is close enough to walk to - so that there is no additional cost of board and lodging. If board and lodging have to be paid, the cost of an education sky-rockets.

It should be mentioned that some of the children not in school are studying in monasteries. The population of monks in Litang County is about 3,000, spread among 38 monasteries. Of these approximately 20 per cent are age 16 or under. (Under Chinese law, children this young are not supposed to enter monasteries, but the law is regularly flouted in western Sichuan). This accounts for 600 of the 2100 not enrolled in regular school. All are boys because there are no nunneries in Litang County. Monasteries are an attractive place for parents to send their sons because, in addition to the religious merit of offering a son, the monastery often provides food and lodging to its monks - certainly an attractive deal for a poor family struggling to get enough to eat.

Of course the education offered by monasteries omits some subjects given in the government schools such as mathematics, Chinese, English, and - less attractively - politics. Monasteries concentrate on Buddhism, Tibetan language, and occasionally on traditional medicine, astronomy, or art. Gele, who is a religious Tibetan, is not convinced that a monastery education necessarily produces a higher level of Tibetan language literacy than that acquired through government schools - it depends on the monastery and the student. "Monastery education is good," he says, "but (government) schools are better" - hardly a surprising assessment for a school administrator.

Gele, 39, is the youngest of seven children, the son of illiterate parents, and the most educated of all his siblings. When he was in primary school, in all Litang county there was only one class for each grade. All his classmates were townspeople; he was the only farmer. Now, as head of the county school system, he works hard to get more children in school. He has traveled from place to place in SIchuan looking for support. He found it at a middle school in Chengdu, where 84 children are pooling support to pay tuition for 21 Litang children. In addition, Kham Aid Foundation donors like Mike Dotson are sponsoring eleven children, and we'll add five more this fall.

Gele has three children of his own (one other died young), and he is determined that they will attend university. As his eldest son has just reached college age, he and his wife sold their beautiful house in central Litang, and have moved into decidedly inferior lodgings on the grounds of the county middle school. This is the only way they can afford university tuition, as government subsidies are drying up and most colleges have to be self-sufficient now.

There are a lot of dedicated people trying to improve the situation for children in Litang, but still the problems of geography and poverty are formidable. Yet Litang is not unusually bleak; most Tibetan areas suffer similar difficulties in educating their children.

If you would like to help children in Litang, or other places in Kham, please see how you can sponsor a child through our scholarship program. Or write to Kara Jenkinson at kara@khamaid.org.