School Responsibility Education And The Reproduction Of Social Class Relations

The study of educational inequality has always been a core issue in the sociology of education,but the study of educational inequality has long focused on the relationship between schooling and other social institutions,and has not looked at the process of social reproduction within schools,thus creating a "black box".At the same time,moral education,as an important part of the schooling process,has been absent from the research perspective of educational inequality.In recent years,moral sociology has reappeared in the research horizon of sociologists,which provides a theoretical basis for us to study the relationship between moral education and social reproduction.The class attribute of morality is generally recognized in sociological circles,allowing this study to discuss the relationship between moral education and social class on its basis.Using an ethnographic approach,this study analyzes the process mechanisms of teaching and learning moral education in schools using the theoretical framework of Moral Habitus in a new urban excellence school in eastern China as a field.This study attempts to enter into the real process of school education and to answer,based on fieldwork and previous theoretical work,how moral education is conducted in new urban schools.What educational discourses and school knowledge are generated in this educational process?What kind of moral judgments do these educational discourses and school knowledge reflect in schools?After elucidating these questions,the paper goes on to explore how the school’s youth understand and respond to these educational discourses and school knowledge?How did the school’s moral education practices affect the school’s adolescents?Once a complete picture of school moral education is developed,it is possible to further discuss how the school’s moral education practices and adolescents’ responses affect the macro-processes of reproducing social class relations?During a two-year field study,I found that a new urban school in eastern China focused more on the development of moral character than on student achievement.By analyzing the three dimensions of "moral habitus"-hexis,ethos and eidos-the study found that the moral order in this school is essentially a kind of responsibility education,which can also be said that it can be said that the moral education in this school is a kind of responsibility education.This responsibility education is implicit in the school discourse of "happiness" and explicit in the school’s specific moral education strategies.In this school,both the implicit educational discourse and the explicit educational strategies fundamentally correspond to the social class of the school’s student body,which reflects the moral judgments of the school’s leaders based on the socioeconomic status of the students.Students strengthen their moral perception of their social class through the physical practice of the school responsibility education process,and in that process create meaning and value through active strategies under the reproduction system,rather than being directly reproduced by it.The group style and moral perceptions that students construct in the process of schooling correspond in a sense to the moral mentality of their social class,that is,the two-way nature of middle-class morality.In general,the operational mechanism of school moral education helps the process of social reproduction,which does not occur objectively,but is the result of the joint subjective action of multiple subjects in the schooling process.It should be emphasized again that since moral education in this school is more reflected in the moral education of responsibility,the concept of responsibility education used in this paper is equivalent to the concept of moral education.