| We Chinese people particularly admire the saying "reading changes fate", which is similar to the belief in the "American Dream": in a society with equal opportunities, anyone can seize the opportunity to flow upward and realize their own dreams through their own struggle.
Due to the fact that this has long been taken for granted, we often forget that it is actually a product of a special social structure, just like "everyone is born equal", which is an ideal state rather than a description of reality.In real life, education does not always change fate, and even if it can, the degree of change varies from person to person and may not solely depend on their personal struggles.
Reproduction of social strata
In the myth of "education changing fate", the most touching thing is undoubtedly the mobility of social classes, which promises that a person can use their personal talents to surpass their social background and obtain opportunities for exceptional promotion. The saying goes, "As a Tanaka in the morning, as a prince in the evening.
But modern scholars have long found through more detailed and in-depth analysis that the competition for acquired abilities has become less and less competitive since the development of the imperial examination system. Some impoverished children from the Ming and Qing dynasties who lacked economic and cultural capital were excluded from the competition from the beginning.stay1905After the abolition of the imperial examination in, the new education system further exacerbated this inequality, as schools and universities were concentrated in cities, and the cost of receiving education was far beyond what ordinary families could afford,The result was a significant increase in the proportion of intellectual elites from wealthy families during the Republic of China era, which led to the loss of stability in rural society and the disruption of the overall level of social integration.In the United States, there are also many people paying attention to this issue. The reason is simple, as it is the most important mechanism for achieving social equity.As Canadian politician and scholar Ye Liting once said, according to the concept of liberal politics, "the concept of 'a good country' itself means that for anyone who is willing to work hard, there is a chance to obtain all good thingsOver the years, although ordinary Americans still habitually do not consider class to be very important in their daily lives, the reality is that the mobility of American society has slowed down, and the "American Dream" has become a fading ideal. The top echelons of society rely on their long-term accumulation of capital and intricate network of relationships to maintain their relatively stable advantages, while the bottom echelons of society find it difficult to climb out of the poverty trap. Only the middle echelons of society may have slightly more opportunities to change their own destiny.This has alerted many politicians and scholars, fearing that it will ultimately lead to social polarization and prevent them from bringing a better America to the next generation.This situation has not changed in the past fifty years, and Harvard University professor Robert Patnam has been tracking and investigating various regions of the United States in recent years107A young man wrote the book 'Our Children' and discovered that21The class differences in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century were even more serious than they were 50 or 60 years ago. Because of the gap between the rich and the poor in terms of family structure, neighborhood community relations, school education, parents' educational level and education methods, "equality of opportunity" has become meaningless.Parents in the upper middle class have more time, energy, and resources to invest in nurturing their children, while children struggling in poor societies and families do not. In this situation, the process of education is not so much an opportunity for them to change their fate, but rather a service for class solidification.
Education divides social classesActually, this is not surprising. After a moment's thought, it can be understood that if education becomes the only channel for everyone to achieve self achievement in a society, then under equal conditions such as vision and intelligence, the children of white-collar workers will definitely have more resources to seize this opportunity than the children of cleaners.The middle class is particularly motivated to do so because they believe more than others that everything they earn is based on their own abilities, while the aristocracy and the poor often feel that education has little impact on their identity and status.
Therefore, almost regardless of which country, the modern urban middle class is often the most enthusiastic about investing in a good education for their children. In Thailand, the traditional Chinese Bangkok middle-class families who have benefited the most from the expansion of university education in nearly half a century have placed more emphasis on education and are willing to invest manpower, material resources, and financial resources in it compared to others. As a result, their children have become professionals in the upper middle class after receiving a good education, thus achieving intergenerational inheritance of social classes.If there is anything different about the United States, it may be that as a country with a deep liberal tradition, the United States has also greatly marketized its education sector. As a result, although the northern states of the United States19The dominant public education system was established at the end of the century, but the role played by the state in educational development has long been very negative.On the eve of the Civil War, advocates such as Henry Barnard rejected private school education, believing that private schools often "divert students to different schools based on external conditions such as the wealth and knowledge of their parents," and provided unequal education, thereby fundamentally dividing people into different classes.
But the result of the development of American history is that the public education system, which receives state funding and management, operates poorly, providing only the most basic education for underprivileged children who have nowhere else to go, while middle and upper class parents try their best to get their children to attend better quality private schools. This may seem free and diverse, but overall it lacks systematicity, and education seems to have become a consumer good that provides differentiated services for different consumer groups.This situation is somewhat similar to that of the UK. The UK has long been known for its laissez faire attitude towards education development1944At the end of the year, legislation and subsequent reforms to promote the Education Act ensured that secondary education in the UK was free to anyone, benefiting a generation. The core of this reform is a secondary school system based on the elite selection system, where outstanding talents from all walks of life are centrally trained.However,1964After the new leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, was re elected in, this bill was revised to encourage the "comprehensive" development of secondary education. Although the original intention was good, it prevented the quality of education from being guaranteed, as the level of education in public schools was no longer significantly different.As a result, as historian Tony Jutter put it1970In the mid-1990s, 'any capable parent wants to spend money to get their children out of this system'. Under this social choice, the rich are eager to buy an education that the poor cannot afford. Good private schools and educational consumption are thriving, while the poor are blocked by this market mechanism.This is not just a question of who can 'spend money to buy better education', the real difference lies in the way education is conducted. This is the core viewpoint of American sociologist Annette LaRou in her book "Unequal Childhood":People from different social classes invest different amounts of time and energy in their children, and their daily behavior towards them varies, ultimately affecting their ability to achieve higher social status in the futureBit.This means that the success of those children depends not only on the innate accumulation of their parents, their own talents and efforts, but also on the acquired influence they receive from their parents.This may sound like a common truth, but the most valuable aspect of sociological research lies not in how astonishing the "truth" it reveals, but in delving deeper into the mechanisms, logic, and details behind it.Lalu's approach to this is typical of a "control group" approach, where she divides the families she observes into two groups: one is white-collar middle-class families, and the other is blue-collar low-income families.She found that there are significant differences in the education methods of these two types of families: white-collar families are a "collaborative cultivation" model, in which parents participate, allowing children to develop strict and regular lives from an early age, guiding and cultivating their abilities at various levels of detail. Family life revolves entirely around the child's life.In blue collar families, financial difficulties make parents focus their main energy on earning money to support their families, without considering how to guide their children to express their feelings, opinions, and thoughts. They also do not believe that children and adults are equal. On the contrary, they tend to clearly tell children what to do instead of persuading them to do things, which is a so-called "natural growth of achievement" model.If blue-collar families tend to 'treat their children as children', believing that there is a clear boundary between them and adults, and they can only be on an equal footing with adults when they grow up; Middle class families, on the other hand, do not consider their children as children and see them as a group that needs special treatment. However, they respect their rights like "little adults" and encourage their importance as unique individuals. This way, they have the skills of reasoning and negotiation since childhood, and can confidently and decisively play the role of successful individuals in society.In her opinion, this subtle family education mode has a decisive impact, which may, to a large extent, lead to the solidification of social strata, and ultimately achieve the unequal reproduction: white-collar children will be more suitable to become white-collar workers, and blue collar children will also be ready to replace their parents from childhood.
Americanization of Chinese educational model
The reason why this becomes a problem is that two family education models with sharp contrast coexist in the society at the same time, which disturbingly results in intergenerational inheritance of the stratum - popularly, "dragon begets dragon, phoenix begets phoenix, and the son of mouse can make holes". Not only that, but also it rationalizes and legalizes the unequal reproduction through education.In an era where each other raised children in the same way, this was not originally a problem. Traditionally, almost all Chinese parents follow the 'natural growth through achievement' model.Looking back now, the parents of our era were really relaxed. They basically only care about the children's clothes and meals, and there is no need to pick them up and drop them off every day. I walked to kindergarten by myself when I was four or five years old. As for my studies, although both of my parents are junior high school students in their third year and have already attached great importance to education, apart from teaching me how to read and arithmetic before school, they have almost never tutored me in my homework. After high school, my mother made it even more clear: "I and your father can no longer understand your books, and we will rely on you to be aware of them in the future.This is not an isolated phenomenon. At that time, some of my classmates' parents didn't even know if their children were taking mid-term exams, so their attention to their studies was understandable. What is completely different from now is that our spare time was at our own discretion, and parents didn't know what to arrange for their children to do - there were no such diverse courses or activities at that time. I didn't attend a day of tutoring classes or any such interest courses, and most of them were mutual aid interest groups spontaneously organized by classmates.At that time, parents naturally expected their children to become successful, but they seemed to have only such expectations and did not have a clear and thorough plan for what to do every day to make their children become successful.Sometimes when chatting with friends, some people joke and say, "I really want to travel back to that era to be a parentIt is naturally impossible to go back. The times are already different now, and the practices of the past may not be applicable to the present - I'm afraid the vast majority of parents' first reaction will feel that such "free range" is absolutely irresponsible for their children.Looking at the anxiety that pervades children's education issues in public discussions today, it is not difficult to imagine that young parents from the urban middle class almost overwhelmingly tend to adopt a "collaborative training" model.Even whether they like it or not, school teachers require parents to spend their energy guiding their children's learning, paying attention to systematically and deeply participating in the planned plan, resulting in the scene of "parents re learning Olympiad math with their children". Many friends around me have been criticized by the teacher for not being proactive enough due to their busy work schedules. |
