“Useless Schooling” or “Hopeless Schooling”: An Ethnographic Study of Lower-Class Rural Parents’ Perceptions on the Value of Schooling

Abstract

Based on the data collected in a one-year long fieldwork in Zhong, a county located in middle part of China, this article reconsiders the concept of “useless schooling,” which was proposed in recent studies on the perceptions of value of education among lower-class rural residents in China. It calls for a understanding of those changes in the macro social structure, which becomes increasingly stratified, and the emerging patterns of educational opportunity structure in the era of social transformation, and argues that this is the base for the understanding lower-class rural parents’ perceptions on the value of schooling. This article employs Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” and conceptualizes the process of how lower-class rural residents form their value on school education as a process of structural factors being internalized into individual dispositions. Based on the data collected, this article proposes to use the concept of “hopeless schooling” to capture their perceptions on the value of school education. It emphasizes that the emerging education opportunity structure and differentiated chances of social mobility by different social groups have gradually been transformed into a stratified pattern of “expectations” for education and social mobility, and proposes the need to examine the ongoing solidification of social structure in this period of transformation.