Education in Mongolia

Education in Mongolia

Education Mongolia Table of Contents http://countrystudies.us/mongolia/ The School System Education in Mongolia traditionally was controlled by the Buddhist monasteries and was limited to monks. Tibetan was the language of instruction, the canonical and liturgical language, and it was used at the lower levels of education. Higher-level education was available in the major monasteries, and often many years were required to complete formal degrees, which included training in logic and debate. With the exception of medicine, which involved an extensive pharmacopoeia and training in herbal medicines, higher education was esoteric and unworldly. Major monasteries supported four colleges: philosophy, doctrine, and protocol; medicine; mathematics, astrology, and divination; and demonology and demon suppression. In the early twentieth century, officials and wealthy families hired tutors for their children, and government offices operated informal apprenticeships that taught the intricacies of written records, standard forms, and accounting. Official Mongolian sources, which tended to depict the prerevolutionary period as one of total backwardness, probably underestimated the level of literacy, but it was undoubtedly low. Secular education began soon after the collapse of Chinese authority in A Mongol-language school under Russian auspices opened in Yihe Huree in 1912; much of the teaching of the forty-seven pupils was done Russian instructors opened. By 1914 a school teaching Russian to Mongolian children was operating in the capital. Its graduates, in a pattern that was to become common, went to cities in Russia for further education. Perhaps in response to the challenge of the few secular schools, monasteries in the 1920s were running schools for boys who did not have to take monastic vows. Such schools used the Mongol language and the curriculums had a heavily religious content. Education expanded slowly throughout the 1920s. As...

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