Negotiating for distance: the Chinese middle-class seeking alternative education in the idyll

ABSTRACT

In recent years, Innovative Schools in Dali have received increasing coverage in Chinese social media and have also attracted middle-class parents from cities, as viable bottom-up educational initiatives. This paper explores the rationales for Chinese middle-class parents’ choice of Innovative Schools in Dali. Analysis of data from online interviews with 33 parents from seven Innovative Schools in Dali revealed three types of narratives parents provided in explaining their alternative school choices: investors, escapees, and idealists. The narratives reflect different ways in which parents negotiate their relationship with mainstream education and Innovative Schools, how they define the “educational goods” they would like to pursue and how they deal with potential tensions within their practice. We then situate the phenomenon within the Chinese educational landscape and discuss its social implications in light of social reproduction theories.

KEYWORDS:

• Middle-class
• alternative school
• parental narratives
• social reproduction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Recently, Dali has become famous for short-term camps for urban students, especially during vacations, and many Innovative Schools in Dali offer these (Guo, 2022). So, the second criterion helps to exclude parents who have temporarily sent their children to Innovative Schools in Dali only for a few days or weeks.

2 The information for all respondents can be accessed via the following link: https://osf.io/q9vku/files/osfstorage/64af9fd0e17d4f00d37aa72b

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a scholarship granted by the China Scholarship Council.