“Useless Schooling” or “Hopeless Schooling”: An Ethnographic Study of Lower-Class Rural Parents’ Perceptions on the Value of Schooling

Abstract

Based on the data collected in a one-year long fieldwork in Zhong, a county located in middle part of China, this article reconsiders the concept of “useless schooling,” which was proposed in recent studies on the perceptions of value of education among lower-class rural residents in China. It calls for a understanding of those changes in the macro social structure, which becomes increasingly stratified, and the emerging patterns of educational opportunity structure in the era of social transformation, and argues that this is the base for the understanding lower-class rural parents’ perceptions on the value of schooling. This article employs Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” and conceptualizes the process of how lower-class rural residents form their value on school education as a process of structural factors being internalized into individual dispositions. Based on the data collected, this article proposes to use the concept of “hopeless schooling” to capture their perceptions on the value of school education. It emphasizes that the emerging education opportunity structure and differentiated chances of social mobility by different social groups have gradually been transformed into a stratified pattern of “expectations” for education and social mobility, and proposes the need to examine the ongoing solidification of social structure in this period of transformation.

Keywords:

• Expectations
• hopelessness of studies
• inutility of studies
• opportunity structures

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is particularly grateful to Professor Cheng Kai Ming, Professor Gerard A. Postiglione, and Dr. Li Xiaoliang in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong, as well as the editor Zhou Sheng at Shanghai Educational Publishing House, for providing valuable recommendations for revisions. The author takes sole responsibility for this work.

Notes

2 See the Wikipedia entry on the “theory of the inutility of studies” (读书无用论, dushu wuyong lun) (in Chinese).

3 For a detailed discussion, see the works of Diane Reay of Cambridge University: Reay (2001, 2009, 2010).

4 The rural tax reforms initiated around the year 2004 effectively mitigated the economic burdens on the residents of Zhong County; in addition, as the number of those heading to the Yangtze River Delta and regions for other employment opportunities in light industrial factories steadily increased, the income of rural residents in Zhong County steadily rose. Around the time when the fieldwork was conducted, the county shed the label of an impoverished county. In 2009–2012, the growth rate for the rural per capita net income in that county remained steady at around 18%, and then declined slightly over the next three years; in 2015, the growth rate was approximately 10%. Per capita income for local rural residents was 4,300 yuan in 2010, and 9,276 yuan in 2015.

5 According to data from the local county education gazette, in 1989, there were approximately 603 local primary schools; by around 2000, which was a period of relatively rapid implementation of policies for school consolidation and restructuring, the number of local primary schools had already fallen to 358; by 2013, which was the first year after the Ministry of Education issued its regulations on the consolidation and restructuring of primary and secondary schools, the number of local primary schools had declined to approximately 200.

6 In 2007–2008, school-selected students represented 50% of newly enrolled first-year senior secondary school students in Zhong County for that year; in 2009–2011, this proportion fell to 30%, and over the next two years, it gradually declined to 20% of the total admitted students. 2015, under the promotion of the local provincial-level government, Zhong County began eliminating school-selected students.

7 To promote the balanced development of the compulsory education stage, the Zhong County education department arranged for the top three senior secondary schools to allocate a certain percentage of their admissions quota to dingxiang sheng (定向生, “targeted-area students”), involving the assignment of targeted quotas to various junior secondary schools, thus enrolling the best new students based on the admissions principle of being “fair and voluntary” and according to examinees’ wishes. Rural junior secondary schools which had previously been rather disadvantaged were thus able to guarantee that a certain number of students would be admitted to these three secondary schools. In 2012, targeted-area students represented nearly 60% of new students at the three senior secondary schools in Zhong County; by 2015, this percentage had risen to 80%.

8 In a certain village where the author carried out concrete fieldwork, around the year 2009, under the promotion of the School Building Safety Project by the Ministry of Education, the village primary school underwent several rounds of maintenance. Around 2013, the old school building was demolished and rebuilt. However, improvements to the corps of qualified teachers were still fairly difficult to achieve. Although the primary school’s teachers on staff had received various sorts of training implemented by the local education department to improve their caliber, replenishment with new teachers was still difficult. Newly added “special assignment teachers” and recently hired teachers were generally assigned to central schools at the seat of the township or town government, where conditions were relatively good.

9 By 2015, the percentage of students attaining a minimum score had reached 46% (calculated on the basis of data published by the local education department). The undergraduate admissions rate for senior secondary school graduates in Zhong County has remained at a relatively high position for its respective municipality—even though this county had long been listed among the ranks of the nation’s impoverished counties. Even compared with the data for the province to which Zhong County belongs, the state of admissions for senior secondary school graduates in Zhong County was still fairly impressive: for instance, in the year 2009, for which data is available, the rate for admission to the undergraduate stage in the province where Zhong County is located was approximately 27%, of which the admissions rate for first-tier universities was 6.9%, while the rate of qualification for 1^st-tier universities in Zhong County was 7.4%. In 2015, the admissions rate for the undergraduate stage in the province where Zhong County is located was nearly 40%, while in Zhong County, this figure was approximately 46%. However, in 2015, the rate of qualification for first-tier universities among examinees in Zhong County was approximately 7%, while the admissions rate for first-tier universities for the respective province rose to approximately 10% in the same year. This reflects in part that examinees in Zhong County have not benefited from the rise in educational opportunities at key universities during this period. Another fact that must be noted is that a fair portion of the examinees in Zhong County qualifying for undergraduate programs are repeat students. In other words, a significant number of the students from rural areas must spend two years or an even longer time preparing for the college entrance examination before they are able to obtain an opportunity to study at university. In 2015, of the approximately 11,400 examinees in Zhong County, 5,300 received a score on the college entrance examination qualifying for admission to an undergraduate program; among them, approximately 2,200 stemmed from local secondary schools dedicated to providing repeat education for students who had previously failed the entrance examination.

10 A number of existing studies have noted that a large proportion of the economic elite in rural society have emerged from among township and rural cadres and other traditional elite classes, allowing the latter to successfully wield their political and economic capital, and successfully maintain their elite status within rural society. Other studies have indicated that, due to more successful marketizing reforms, the importance of human capital has also gradually increased, and those rural residents who have accumulated a certain amount of human and economic capital have, through judicious allocation and application of said capital, gradually developed into a new economic elite. (For specific discussions, refer to the studies by Bian Yanjie, Ni Zhiwei, and other figures on marketizing reforms and changes to mechanisms for status allocation. For details, see: Bian Yanjie, Lu Hanlong, Sun Liping, Shichang zhuanxing yu shehui fenceng: Meiguo shehui xuezhe fenxi Zhongguo [Market transformation and social stratification: American sociologists analyze China], Beijing: Shenghuo · dushu · xinzhi sanlian shudian, 2002). In two situations during this study, I found that, while sampling, and particularly when selecting economically elite families, the selected families were those who did not personally engage in township and village cadre work.

11 Although there is still some controversy surrounding studies on social stratification in China during the transitional period, it has essentially been confirmed that, relative to ordinary agricultural laborers, leaders and other management personnel at government agencies, party organizations, enterprises, and state-run institutions, professional and technical personnel, and the new economic elite (including the owners of private enterprises), et cetera hold advantages in terms of social status. In the example of income, according to information from the statistical yearbook of a local first-tier city, rural annual per capita income was approximately 4,500 yuan, the per capita income of cadres at government agencies and the leaders of enterprises and state-run institutions was approximately 11,000 yuan, and the income of professional and technical personnel at institutions for science, education, culture, health, and so on was approximately 10,000 yuan.

12 According to statistics by local departments, among Zhong County’s population of more than 950,000, the migrant labor population approaches 300,000, exceeding 30% of the total population. The majority of the migrant laborers are young, able-bodied adults; due to economic reasons and policy restrictions, most are unable to bring their children to study at their place of employment.

13 I use the word hope to express subjective thinking that does not take into account the constraints of actual conditions, and the word expectation to express aspirations that take the actual situation into account.

14 For the residents of Zhong County, “third-tier universities” were a fairly risky educational investment, with the most important reason being the costly tuition. For instance, in 2009, on admission to a “third-tier” school, the annual tuition payments exceeded 10,000 yuan; by around 2015, tuition for certain majors at coastal “third-tier” schools that were recruiting in Zhong County exceeded 20,000. Many students who could be admitted to a “third-tier” school on the basis of their first examination score instead choose to study for another year and retake the college entrance examination, in the hope of testing into a “second-tier” school with cheaper tuition.

15 For instance, a study by Wang Weiyi shows that, around the year 2010, the opportunities for the children of leaders at party-government organizations, enterprises and state-run institutions, and other classes to study at a key university were as much as two times higher than the social average (for children in the class of leaders at party-government organizations, enterprises and state-run institutions alone, the opportunities were as much as 10 times higher than the social average). In distinct contrast, the admissions opportunities during this period for the children of rural classes, who then represented 48.3% of the employed population, were less than half of the social average. For specifics, see: Wang Weiyi, “Gaodeng jiaoyu ruxue jihui huode de jieceng chayi fenxi—jiyu 1982–2010 nian woguo 16 suo gaoxiao de shizheng diaocha” (Analysis of class differences in obtaining opportunities for admission to higher education—based on an empirical survey of 16 institutions of higher education in China in 1982–2010), Gaodeng jiaoyu yanjiu (Journal of Higher Education), 2013, No. 12.

16 After 2012, the percentage of school-selected students in Zhong County declined substantially. In 2015, Zhong County began eliminating school-selected students, which naturally mitigated the economic pressure on parent occasioned by school selection.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xie Ailei

Xie Ailei is an associate professor in the School of Education, Guangzhou University.