A Basic Study on Education and Culture of Minority Groups in Xinjiang in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China

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This research project was carried out in order to investigate the educational problems of Chinese minority groups in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. The team of anthropologists (Maruyama, Narisue, Erdeny and Zhang) met Uygur, Kazaf and Xibe parents and children in Urumqi, Kashgar and Ili. They observed how these minority groups try to maintain their traditional ethnic cultures in the forms of folk dance, songs, and horsemanship. While they are guaranteed by the government to use and maintain their languages, traditional endogamy came to be difficult year by year. The visual anthropological method turned out to be very effective to describe the folk culture.The comparative education team (Gondo, Mochida, Fang and Li) examined the ability of mathematics among junior high school students with Han, Uygur and Kazaf nationalities in Urumqi, Kashgar and Ili. They found a big gap between Han students and minority students. They interpret the unfavorable results among the minority groups due to such factors as lack or shortage of textbooks, qualified teachers, inappropriate education at home.This type of field research has scarcely been done by foreign researchers so far. The areas we could get into were limited only in the "open areas" but our partners of Xinjiang Normal University made it possible for us to carry out this project.