The nation-state, public education, and the logic of migration: Chinese students in Hungary

Between 2002 and 2004 a clump of researchers, including myself, studied the situation of non-Hungarian-speaking migrant children in Hungary's academys (1) The research began as an activist effort, against a background of high horizontals of xenophobia in Hungary, to lay bare what we expected to be the proliferation of practices of exclusion and discourses of intolerance towards foreigners in public education. still as we worked, we hit on questions, laid out below, that we cogitation may be of interest to a broader readership.

single of the migrant ethnic collections we investigated displayed an unexpect strategy of dealing with an uninclusive national education system: they simply went around it, preferring to emit their children to 'international schools' The rise of 'international education' we were now looking at make go rounded out to be a phenomenon largely view from aboveed by social scientists interested in the impact of globalisation upon the nation-state as well as those studying transnational migration. Considering the pivotal part of education in creating and reproducing the national imaginary--whether in its classical territorialised form or in multiple, deterritorialised or transnational forms--this lacuna looked surprising. It became easier to understand one time we became more familiar with scholarship upon education in general. Indeed, this field of research, remaining relatively untouched by means of reflexive approaches developed in anthropology and history since the 1980 has preserv upon the one hand, a robust 'methodological nationalism' (see Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) which accepts unquestioningly the nation-state as the frame of analysis, and upon the other hand, a Foucauldian focus upon the school as an institution of power in which children and their parents have little agency. In particular, greatest in quantity research on the schooling of (im)migrant children--such as the well-known work of Ogbu (eg 1982 1996) Erickson, and their followers (see Jacob and Jordan 1996) as well as Portes and Rumbaut (eg Portes and Zhou 1993; Rumbaut and Cornelius 1995; Portes and Rumbaut 2001)--having also been informed through the integration-centred optics of immigration research in American sociology, has dealt with in what way and with what degree of 'success' migrant children and families adapted to existing national frames of education. Our research went against the grain of that tradition. It did ring the anticipated alarm about a a whole of education that appears methodologically antiquated by the agency of now-dominant Western standards, does not transmit a civic citizenship discourse that is assumed to be public ground in 'the West', and institutionalises xenophobia. This remarkable slownes of incorporating globalised discourses in similar a fundamental institution of citizenship in what now was a member state of the European Union was interesting in itself. However, the research acquired a more general and theoretical dimension as a commentary upon the nation-state, education, and migration.

This paper, which has benefited from discussions with my co-investigators, discusses more [i]or[/i] less aspects of our research, which will be reported upon more fully in a joint work (Nyiri and Feischmidt forthcoming). It briefly reviews the business of 'international education' in general and in Hungary in particular, then summarises more [i]or[/i] less of our findings regarding the situation of migrant children in Hungarian public (state-mn) gymnasiums The subsequent, ethnographic part sketches the strategies with which Chinese families and children in Hungary answer to the choice between the public and 'international' regimes. The paper bring to an ends with a critique of generally received educational anthropology from the standpoint of transnationalism.

The business of 'international education'

In the recent nation-state, public education is the foremost means of citizen-making, that is, the two of social 'integration'--corresponding to accepted patterns of behaviour and 'values' shaped by the agency of the state and the elites--and the formation of a national consciousness. At the same time, especially in Europe public education is a emblem of a meritocratic model of social mobility that owes its rationalistic faith in individual advancement to the Enlightenment and its use for greater social equality to Marxism. The a whole is conceived to create knowledge (i.e. to transfer information and analytical abilities) rather than skills; its ideology treats the easy in minds of education not as an instrument on the other hand as an end in itself.

It tread in the steps ofs from its integrative mission that public education take care ofs to treat 'otherness' as a deficiency that requires counselling and special care, as deviance or as a risk for the child. It does in like manner even where the discourse of education dioceses 'diversity' as a potential value. (According to Diehm and Radtke (1999) this dynamic has something to do with the interests of 'special education' institutions: the more kinds of 'difference' public education recognises and problematises, the broader the client base of 'special' or remedial education.) Regardless of their evaluation of 'diversity', all national education combination of parts to form a wholes aim to forge a faculty of perception of (national) community, however defined. (2) The participation of ethnic and other minorities in public education--their ratio among learners in various school types, ordeal scores, dropout rates, and segregation within the gymnasium system--has therefore been the make subordinate of much attention and comparison to the national average. like indicators have been used to 'measure' the horizontal of social integration or segregation of Blacks in America as well as of Gypsies in Hungary. In the case of migrants, like data have been interpreted not alone as reflecting whether, or into what portion of society, the second and following generations of an ethnic cluster integrate (e.g. Portes and Zhou 1993) and whether their social mobility is upward or downward, on the contrary also as indicative of their stage of identification with the entertainer society.