Mongolia—Education System

In the past one hundred years, Mongolia's education system has changed in tandem with its dramatic social and political transformations. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a Buddhist theocracy governed what is now Mongolia, and consequently most formal education took place in a system of monasteries that covered Mongolia's territory. These centers of learning not only provided basic religious training, but also offered higher education in topics as diverse as logic, medicine, and the arts. Though sophisticated, the education system was not universal, and no more than 10 percent of the adult population achieved literacy.

This situation changed in the 1920s, when a new one-party government with close ties to the Soviet Union took control of the country. This new government gradually dismantled the religious monastery system and instituted its own system of universal education based on a Russian model. The model excelled in many respects.

In 1989, however, the situation changed again, when the Mongolian government shifted to a multi-party system, loosened its economic ties with Russia, and began the transition to a market economy. These changes had immediate effects on the existing school system, although by 1990, Mongolia could boast a highly educated public with an adult literacy rate of 96 percent. Educational funding has been cut, attendance levels have decreased, and in response to the perceived decline in the quality of public schools, private schools have begun to emerge as educational options. Through these various political changes, Mongolian educational systems have had to overcome common obstacles—a substantial mobile pastoralist population, a transportation system depending on unpaved roads, and the lowest population density on the planet—to reach the minds of individual Mongolians.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a Tibetan Buddhist theocracy had governed the territory of Mongolia for nearly three hundred years. By 1900, nearly 1,700 monasteries checkered Mongolia's territory and served as clinics, courts, markets, centers for the arts, and schools for the local population. Novice monks were trained in the basics of Buddhist religion, while a few select students advanced to higher degrees in the educational system. Generally, the largest monasteries contained four academic colleges—Buddhist studies and debate, Buddhist tantrology (study of a difficult regime of psychophysical exercises meant to speed the practitioner to a perfected state of a Buddha), Tibetan medical science, and Buddhist astrology, which included subjects such as divination, mathematics, and rhetoric. Depending on the discipline, a student might require twenty years to attain the highest degree.

Although nearly one in five Mongolians was counted as a monk in 1921, many Mongolians did not pass through monastery schools. In larger settlements, the government established schools that trained youth to enter the country's small secular bureaucracy. In western Mongolia, for example, a school was established in 1761 to train pupils in the Mongolian, Manchu, and Tibetan languages. In addition to formal schooling, a great deal of education took place in the home and community. Children learned the knowledge necessary for herding from their parents, and occasionally parents invited monks to their home to read scriptures and teach their children short lessons. In addition, skilled craftspeople passed the knowledge of blacksmithing, woodworking, felting, and folk medicine to apprentices outside the monastery system.

Although the formal education system in prerevolutionary times managed to educate advanced Buddhist scholars and bureaucrats, only a small proportion of the population learned how to read. In the 1920s, this situation began to change as a new one-party secular government supported largely by the nascent Soviet Union pushed to modernize the country according to the Soviet model. Along with this modernization effort came the goal of universal education. By 1934, the government had built fifty-nine state elementary schools, and five years later, the number of state primary schools had grown to ninety-three. Communities and parents, fearing the loss of educational opportunities with the dissolution of the monastic system, had also established more than one hundred voluntary schools, which were taken over by the state in 1939. Still, according to the scholar Charles Bawden (1968: 380), by 1940, only 11 percent of children were being taught in schools of any sort, and the literacy rate for individuals eight years and over was no more than 20 percent.

While the government was building state schools and working toward higher literacy rates, it was also dismantling monasteries; after a series of purges in the 1930s, nearly all monasteries had been abandoned or destroyed. Throughout the middle of the twentieth century, the Mongolian government continued to promote basic literacy. By 1965, all Mongolians were guaranteed four years of education, and the eight-year general-education and labor-polytechnic school system proposed in the same year eventually led to eight years of free education for all Mongolians.

In the 1940s, Mongolia's government began to complement its secondary school network with a system of higher education. In 1942, the Mongolian State University was established in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar as the state's first nationally funded institute for higher education. It was modeled after universities in Russia and had three departments—pedagogy, medicine, and veterinary medicine. Within a decade, the university was establishing semiautonomous research teaching institutes—the State Pedagogical Institute in 1951, the Agricultural Institute in 1958, and the Medical Institute in 1961. During this time, Mongolia began to form academic exchanges with the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, and many Mongolians began to travel to Moscow and eastern Europe for advanced training in the arts and sciences.

By 1990, the state schools offered ten years of free education throughout the Mongolian countryside. To fulfill the goal of education for all, children of nomadic families were sent to central settlements and provided with free boarding. Although most education took place in the Mongolian language, Russian was generally required as a second language, and several prestigious schools in larger cities conducted classes exclusively in Russian. After secondary school, students who passed admissions exams were granted free access to higher education in Ulaanbaatar or several other Mongolian cities. The best students were given the option of continuing their studies in the Soviet Union or in other cooperating countries in Europe.

Several indicators attest to the quality and coverage that the Mongolian education system had attained by 1990. Primary school enrollment was nearly universal at 98 percent, while 85 percent of students progressed to secondary school and 15 percent to higher education. Due to this high degree of coverage, the adult literacy rate had reached 96 percent. In 1989, there were 615 state schools, and 14.5 percent of pupils, mostly from herding families, lived in dormitory accommodations.

As Mongolia's economy worsened in the 1990s, the education system experienced several difficulties. Government budget constraints led to decreased funding for schools, while increased fuel costs took money away from teaching to the necessary task of heating classrooms in winter. Attendance has fallen, especially in the countryside, where families frequently keep their children at home to help with herding. To compensate for reduced budgets for higher education, a student fee structure was introduced in 1993, whereby student-paid tuition was expected to cover the full cost of teachers' salaries. Many students who would have had free higher education before 1993 are now unable to pay the tuition for a bachelor's degree. Meanwhile, in 1991, the Mongolian parliament authorized the first private higher-education institutions, which by 1997 had enrolled about 30 percent of the country's 36,000 full-time college students. Despite these changes, many Mongolians still maintain a deep respect and concern for education and will probably work to maintain the advances they achieved in the last century.

Bawden, Charles R. (1968) The Modern History of Mongolia. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Jagchid, Sechin, and Paul Hyer. (1979) Mongolia's Culture and Society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Weidman, John C., Regsurengiin Bat-Erdene, John L. Yeager, Javzan Sukhbaatar, Tsendjav Jargalmaa, and Suren Davaa. (1998) "Mongolian Higher Education in Transition: Planning and Responding under Conditions of Rapid Change." Tertium Comparationis 4, 2.