Underclass Of Society And Education

The underclass is the impoverished class system in society that should be givenparticular attention by scholars and politicians. People's real living conditions andmiscellaneous problems on this hierarchy directly and clearly reveal the truth that,Chinese government achieved huge accomplishments since the reform andopening-up policy, nonetheless, imbalance obviously exists between the rural andurban, among different regions, different industries as well as different social classes;inequality implicitly exists in the structural and relational landscape of the social andpolitical institutions. Meanwhile, designing and implementing the "DifferentiatedCompensation" policy, which has been politically legitimized by most nations toaddress the issue of social justice, is still quite formidable and challenging. Theunderclass population, which is impotent in articulation and highly under represented,has no control on its own fate, and therefore highly relies on the nation's conscience.Academic researchers and policymakers being the major agents to help representationof the underclass, their attitudes, either to neglect, to lead, to objectively judge, tosympathize, to understand, or to be considerate or integrated, turn to be a crucialquestion. Ultimately, it is essential for the above two agents to reveal the underclassgroup's true demands for interests, to understand their complex behavioral logic, andto design public policies which could effectively represent and address the underclassproblems.Based on multifactor analysis, the author selected Jie County, an agriculturedominated county in western China as a representative underclass field to conductlongitudinal empirical survey and collect both quantitative and qualitative data.Adopting the perspective of education, the author aims to uncover the educationalobstacles and factors hidden on the four dimensions of the underclass, community,family, school, and the whole population as a group, that lead to the vicious circle ofissues and dilemmas in the underclass. The main findings of the study are as follows:First, regarding the underclass community, the author conducted a complicatedhistoric review of the evolution of the township schools against the background of thenational and societal structural changes as well as educational policy evolution duringthe115years from1990to2014. The review found that the rural schools, regarded ascenter for education and civilization in the underclass field, experienced aggravateddecline due to both external interferences and internal deviations. The phenomenon ofmassive consolidation of rural school in modern China is named “bottom-up literacypromotion (Wen Zi Shang Yi)” by scholars, an opposite to the historical phenomenonof massive construction of rural schools, known as “top-down literacyuniversalization (Wen Zi Xia Xiang),” has led to educational dilemma in the underclass. Based on discourse analysis and field observation with variousparticipants on various field sites, the author found that the “Wen Zi Shang Yi”phenomenon is resulted from both external social incentives and internal educationalmotives. The former include village culture subaltern to the urban culture, thebreakdown of the knowledge and power in villages, impotent articulation of selfinterests of the underclass, educational poverty under the consumption mentality,while the latter include low attraction to rural teachers, lack of staff quota, andexcessive administrative control. In order to make a difference to the current dilemmaof declining education development in villages due to the “Wen Zi Shang Yi”movement, the author adopts the anti-normative theory of justice and the perspectiveof social stratification, and puts forth a new strategy of public policy designingframework for the underclass.Second, as for the underclass families, the author attempts to be the pioneer to doan empirical research among the farmer families, the individual farmers, students andparents in a subaltern administrative villages to address the topic of "education utility",and the research has led to six findings as follows.(a) According to the data ofindicator of "children's general education status", families with children who are inschools hold higher recognition of literacy utility than families with children whohave already finished education in schools. However, in the profound survey to theformer families, it is found that the higher education stage their children are taking,the lower the recognition of the usefulness of education. While among the latterfamilies, the ones that hold the highest recognition are those who have no childrenunder education or children dropped off at the compulsory education stage. At thesame time, those whose children completed high school study take up the highestproportion among families holding the position of education uselessness.(b) Inaccordance with data regarding " attachment between farmers and land", the moredependency on land work revenue in the family income, the higher the families regardeducation as useless.(c) According to data analysis of the indicator "fortune andstatus","affluent families" with annual household income between50,000and100,000yuan hold the highest recognition of education utility. And yet, more familieswhose annual household income below10,000yuan consider education as uselesscomparing with other groups. Besides, from the data of "family structure/status", it isshown that families with single parent domination hold lower regard for theusefulness of children's education.(d) In terms of "gender of children", many morefamilies with girls treat education useless than those with boys.(e) More male thanwomen farmers show agreement on insignificance of education, while compared withother social groups, more students and their parents consider education useful.(f)Although most individuals think that education is useful in rural families, the numberof those who think education is useless is still a considerable proportion, besides,there is inconsistency between their words and behavior. Therefore, as we can see from all the data-based findings, the mentality of "education is useless" deeply andwidely exists in the underclass of the society.Third, from the perspective of underclass schools, the author puts forward thatthe underlying secret of the subaltern microscopic reproduction is achieved in theunderclass schools by the "anti-school culture" among students and the seatsarrangement by teachers based on qualitative studies in Yun Town, Jie County. Duringthe study, a total of22eight graders and nine graders are stratified from a nine-yearcompulsory school as participants. Based on observation and interviews, it isdiscovered that the anti-school culture represented by these participants consists ofdespising their teachers, creating mess in the classroom, expressing protest against theschool authorities through language and behaviors, organizing multiple types of peersgroups (based on brotherhood, mentorship, relative relations, love affair relations etc.)to express group based protest through violence, theft and other misbehaviors. Tosome degree, such anti-school culture is similar to but not the same as the culturecreated by "Lads" in the industrial towns in the UK" and the "Migrant Children" inmigrant workers' children schools in Beijing. Specific characteristics are as follows:(a) compared to Lads' superiority and the Migrant Children's inferiority, the teenagerparticipants in Yun Town have an alternative mentality mixed with "losers" and"tyrants" mentality.(b) By comparison to the Lads who have an obvious negativeattitude to knowledge and diplomas and the Migrant Children who have a clear"affirmative" goal for diplomas, the teenager participants convey non-uniformity andfuzzy in words and behavior toward their recognition of knowledge and diploma.(c)The Lads apparently have reached a "partial insight" about the truth of the educationalstructure and system, whereas the Migrant Children are definitely blind of it, andparticipants in Yun Town also have "partial insight" about it. Furthermore, byresearching the seating in the eighth and ninth grades in the school, the study hasfound the eighth grade has a "center-periphery" seating arrangement in order to "shaperole models", while the ninth grade has the function based front-back seatingarrangement. The seat arrangement forged individual students to build a so calledself-identity according to the space based position in the class, which led to differentlearning experiences, shaped different levels of study groups as well as theircorresponding behaviors, and even implicitly filtered students to different life andprofessional tracks after they graduate from schools.Fourth, regarding the underclass population as a whole group, the authoranalyzed the deeply rooted educational obstacles for the group in their pursuit of the"Chinese Dream," which is a newly created concept by the Chinese governmenthighlighting more concerns for the underclass group. To facilitate the analysis, theauthor classified the underclass group can be divided into two sub-groups, the groupthat retains in villages and the group that leaves the village. For the former group, the author analyzed the mechanism system from kindergarten education to the job market,and found that there are various educational factors hindering the group to realize the"Chinese Dream", including, ignorance of early childhood education, injustice of thenearest school placement policy, difficulties in the development of compulsoryeducation in the underclass schools, the structure diversion factors after junior school,the weakening family social and economic status, dualistic labor market segmentation,difficulties in the employment, mobility and integration in urban areas. For the othersub group, the author attempted to understand the challenges from the perspective ofthe major policy issue of migrant students' right to participate in national collegeentrance exam in cities. And it is found that no matter whether the policy is against orsupportive to migrant students' right to the exam, the policy is of little help for theunderclass group to achieve their Chinese dream. On the one hand, if the migrantstudents are still not be permitted to participate national college entrance exam incities, the migrant underclass students will be deprived of equal resources in highereducation, equal college financial supply, equal chances of national college admissionand other institutional resources for them to realize their "Chinese Dream." On theother hand, even if the policy allows migrant students to participate the exam, it islikely to bring up the following risks:(a) it would be a misfortune for the underclassin cities and a sacrifice of their previous benefits;(b) the migrant underclass workerscannot really benefit from such kind of policies, on the contrary, they may be facedwith a different type of deprivation of resources;(3) the underclass of the society andrural education could be subjected to further decay.