Peasants’ Educational Choices For Children On The Logic Of ’Living A Life Of Fortune’

Rural dropouts is neither conductive to improve the living standards of individuals and peasant families’, nor to the national development. Thus all modern states are committed to reduce dropout rates. Our government has carried out a number of policies to decrease the dropout rate. But it seems that the effectiveness of these policies seems limited. Scholars has made many researches on rural dropping out from different aspects. But these existing researches have rarely been able to look out from the perspective of peasants, and understand their educational choices for their children from their real-life needs. And almost no scholar has done a comparative analysis by combining dropping out and at school. In this paper, the author takes the word "Living a Life of fortune" as the key word of understanding peasant’s living logic. By giving the word a theoretical interpretation, the author successfully develops a stronger theoretical framework to explain rural dropouts.The study found that ’living a life of fortune’ is the sum of operating activities aiming at their children’s good life. Peasants’ ultimate pursuit is to living a good life. There are four metrics of a good life:namely having a successful child, continuing family line, harmonious family life and economic prosperity. All the peasants’ activities serve to these four metric. In order to have a good life, they must have a good life attitude, and also they must follow a good life strategy. In two ways the logic of ’Living a Life of Fortune’ affects the dropout possibilities:on the one hand, the life attitude has a significant impact on children dropout. Parents with improper life attitude can destroy the whole family and cause the child to drop out of school, on contrast, parents with proper life attitude can help an average student to go to university. Parents’ good life attitude can also be passed on to their children to stimulate their motivation to learn hard and further reduce the dropout possibility. On the other hand, life strategies are important factors in dropping out. In their real life parents uphold the principle of education prospect supreme, as long as their children have an excellent performance in study, they will support them at any cost. But if they perform pool in study they will be reluctant to support them even if they have a lot of money. In view of the increasingly high marriage cost, parents would consider to let the poor performing children drop out to earn money together with them. So as to get marriage earlier. Family economic is an important factor in peasants’ children dropout, but it does not necessarily lead to drop-out. The key factor lies in children’s academic performance. If they perform excellent, their parents will be motivated to overcome the economic difficulties, and bite the bullet to support them. In addition, in families with many children, there is a tendency to choose male and excellent ones in educational choice. Of course, this does not mean that female children cannot have access to education.From the foregoing analysis, rural education policy must pay attention to correct peasants’life attitudes, enhance and maintain the initial expecting on education, and eliminate the worries for peasants to purport education.