From The Countryside To The Margin Of City

With the progression of modernization and urbanization China witnesses an unprecedented tide of rural workers flooding into big cities to make a living while having to face the fact of the rural workers becoming the marginalized group. Based on this context, this thesis is focused on the second migrants (i.e. children of the rural workers )' education in cities. Traditionally the marginalized group is one of the most important research objects of educational ethnography, so I chose a typical simply-equipped school established especially for the children of the rural workers and made a fieldwork almost lasting 2 months. I hope that I could do my best to probe into the process of these children's social psychological change on the view of inner culture and provide some valuable theory basis for the policy-maker.The thesis is composed of 5 parts:Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction of the problem to emphasize its importance. Besides, this part interprets some anthropological terms.Chapter 2 firstly retrospects to the history of China's labor migration, analyzes the reason and points out the peasantry's psychological change. Then it introduces the western scholars' ethnographic research on education of floating population under a similar historical background.Chapter 3 is the fieldwork part. Drawing support from the analysis of the school's headmaster, it explores the power motivating these children to study. And the power is to accumulate the culture capital so as to transform it into economic capital and social capital.Chapter 4 cites a lot of typical cases on the basis of thorough fieldwork and draws a conclusion that it's a far cry from their imagination that they wish to transform the accumulated culture capital to the other two capitals. At the same time they try to adapt to the city life. While colliding with the city culture, they form a transitional character, i.e. dissociating from the fields while wandering from the city. Consequently it draws the theoretical conclusion of the cultural consistency and the formation of habitus, generation gap, cultural tradition and cultural identity.Chapter 5 is the last part of the thesis. Based on the former study, it emphasizes the significance of the education of the rural workers' children from the view of the culture.