Symbolic violence or semiotic mediator? Examining the regulative order through school rituals in China

Abstract

This paper contributes to the discussion on how Chinese ‘unpromising’ pedagogic practices featured with strong framing over teacher-student relations contribute to students’ educational involvement. Based on semi-structured interviews with 120 students from 4 secondary schools in Eastern China, this qualitative study employs Bernstein's concept of the ‘regulative order’ to examine the regulative dimension of schooling inscribed in school rituals. The Bernsteinian approach offers both an internal perspective on specific configurations of school rituals and an external perspective on socio-cultural meanings attached to them. The present study finds that the regulative order in China's schooling comes to be in a double-faced position. On the one hand, the regulative order imbued with the notion of ‘impersonality’, enacted through consensual rituals that make explicit authority relationships, serves as a ‘semiotic mediator’ in effecting a desirable separation from home and commitment to the school code. On the other hand, it imposes ‘symbolic violence’ on low-achieving students, through differentiating rituals which deepen existing academic divisions. It argues that the strongly framed regulative order is encapsulated within Confucian educational ideals and the distribution of its different aspects among students reflects a moral order characteristic with exam-oriented meritocracy in society.