Despite the state's unrelenting efforts to enforce compulsory basic education, schooling in rural ethnic China remains an elusive ideal that leads to massive dropout and prepares many only for factory sweatshops. Based on 16 months of ethnographic research, this article examines the disjuncture between the official education policy known as the Two Basics Project (TBP) and the lived practices and beliefs observed in two rural ethnic communities. It investigates how students' disenchantment and withdrawal from school challenges compulsory education as a fragile universalist attempt at social progress. Instead of merely examining what factors contribute to the policy failure, the analysis questions the very "progressive" ideals and teleological visions at work in China's educational programming, and challenges binaries such as literacy/illiteracy, cultured/uncultured, modernity/traditionalism. (Contains 26 notes.)