Rural schooling and good life in late socialist Laos

This chapter, co-authored by Roy Huijsmans and Mr Piti is part of the open access book Rural Life in Late Socialism: Politics of development and imaginaries of the future.

The chapter by Huijsmans and Piti, entitled ‘Rural Schooling and Good Life in Late Socialist Laos: Articulations, sketches and moments of good time’, analyses representations of rurality featured in Lao primary school textbooks and brings these into dialogue with children’s expressions of good life based on classroom observations and with description of ethnographic moments of good time witnessed on school grounds in schools in rural Laos.

The chapter sheds light on the workings of schooling in rural Laos. In addition, the tensions between ideas of the good life formally articulated by the Lao state in textbooks, sketched in the margins of classrooms by rural students and practiced by diverse school-related actors in the context of rural schooling, reflect many of the contradictions characterizing the condition of late socialism in rural Laos.

Open access

The book is edited by Phill Wilcox, Jonathan Rigg and Minh T.N. Nguyen and published by BRILL. The book can be freely downloaded.