Asian Education on Film, Episode Ten

Asian Education on Film, Episode Ten

Lunana - A Yak in the Classroom (Pawo Choyning Dorji, Bhutan, 2019)

From bustling New York, the setting of the film I discussed last time, English Vinglish, we move to the Himalayas for a story about what is portrayed as ‘the most remote school in the world’. Lunana - A Yak in the Classroom is set in Bhutan, the Buddhist kingdom nestled between Northeast India and Tibet, famous in recent years for its pursuit of ‘Gross National Happiness’.

The difficulties of delivering modern schooling in poor, geographically remote regions is one theme here. Demand for modern education in remote communities is strong; herders and farmers see schooling as offering their children a chance of a better life, through employment in the modern economy. At the same time, governments interested in social control and strong borders see schools as useful for nation building as well as rural uplift. In Lunana, we’re shown village children raising Bhutan’s national flag and singing the national anthem at the start of the school day.

The challenges of schooling in such remote regions are cultural as well as logistical. Sometimes, transforming local culture is precisely the point: to Bhutan’s north, in Tibet, boarding schools have been used in recent years to suppress the Tibetan language and promote consciousness of a monolithic ‘Chinese national community’. Elsewhere, for example in Soviet-era Mongolia, boarding schools performed a more complex role, offering modern education to herding communities partly in order to maintain the herding lifestyle. In remote communities, primary schooling is typically local, but secondary education happens in boarding schools. We hardly see any secondary-age children in Lunana. Perhaps some are away at school in the town or city.

If so, how many of those young people will return? As modern education reaches the most remote communities, young people are increasingly drawn towards modern, urban life. The lure of the city is hard to resist. I remember visiting a fairly remote region of the Peruvian Amazon on a rainforest tour in 1988. Our small party arrived by boat at a riverside village, to be greeted by locals dressed in grass skirts who sold us beads and necklaces with pirhana skulls. But as we returned to our boat, passing the village school playground, we saw the same children who had just greeted us in native dress playing basketball in trainers and Michael Jordan t-shirts. The vision of pure, uncorrupted, indigenous jungle life sold to tourists like us concealed a more complex reality.

But is the inevitable transformation of indigenous cultures a reason for limiting the spread of modern education? In recent years, some scholars have tended almost to fetishise indigeneity. The ineffable wisdom of indigenous peoples is often contrasted with the shallow consumerism of modern, Western life. This lament for lost traditions is understandable. However, exoticising indigenous communities, or portraying them simply as victims of Western colonialism, can deny or belittle their agency. And the dichotomy between Western and non-Western societies is far too simplistic. For almost all of us, the comforts and stimulation of modern city life possess an almost irresistible allure, but their pursuit can leave our lives feeling soulless, empty and stripped of deeper meaning. This tension is at the heart of that foundation stone of modern German literature, Goethe’s Faust, which Marshall Berman described as ‘a veiled debate about the modernisation of Germany’. Faust pursues freedom and cultural dynamism, but at the cost of his soul. The protagonist of Lunana, the teacher Ugyen, finds himself facing a very similar sort of dilemma.

The film can be viewed here: https://www.bilibili.tv/en/video/4787537374091776

Further reading:

Marshall Berman (2010). All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Ines Stolpe (2006). Educational Import: Local Encounters with Global Forces in Mongolia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Leibold, J., & Dorjee, T. (2023). 'Learning to be Chinese: colonial-style boarding schools on the Tibetan plateau'. Comparative Education, 60(1), 118–137. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2023.2250969