Between Private and Public Initiatives? Private Schools in pre-1951 Tibet

Alice Travers (1)

1 CRCAO - Centre de recherche sur les civilisations de l'Asie Orientale

The idea that there was no other type of education in pre-1951 Tibet than the religious education delivered in monasteries is common, as the idea that education in private schools—when their existence is acknowledged—was the preserve of a small social elite. This socio-historical study pursues three main goals: first, to highlight and document the existence of a rather important network of private schools in the first half of the 20th century in Lhasa and in other areas of the Ganden Phodrang territory; second, to describe this system of private schools and the education it provided; last, to illuminate the relationship with government schools and the questioning of the Tibetan concept of “private education”, by analyzing the socio-professional profile of most teachers of these private schools and their mode of students’ recruitment. The paper is based on secondary literature, as well as on my own research through interviews in Tibet and India and the reading of autobiographical accounts published in Tibet and in India.

Mots clés: private schools; education; tibet; history; social history; government; aristocracy; middle class

Domaines: Histoire

Alice Travers. Between Private and Public Initiatives? Private Schools in pre-1951 Tibet. Himalaya : the journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan studies, 2015, 35 (2). ⟨hal-01405152⟩