Life and Education Situation Refactoring of Left-Behind Children Under the Perspectives of Rural Social Governance

• In Event: Systems Governing Chinese Education Reforms: The Problem of Exclusions in the Efforts to Include

Abstract

With the rapid development of urbanization in China, millions of children are left behind in the rural areas under the custody of their grandparents or other relatives while their parents make a living in the cities as the migrant workers. Since the late 1990s, the issue of left-behind children has caused extensive public concern and been explored in regional empirical research but with little changes. Based on the rural field observations, interviews, and the meta-analysis of the research reports, this paper describes the life and education of left-behind children from the sociocultural perspective. It examines the social and cultural reasons and explores the policy suggestions to reconstruct the situations of left-behind children’ life and education.
This study argues that urban-rural dual structure in the process of urbanization has caused the left-behind children to be a kind of “institutional orphans”. Under pressure to survive and the pursuit of materialism, a large number of young couples give up their parental responsibilities along with the process of urbanization. One consequence is that the social integrated and educational functions of the rural society organizations have been stripped. The rebuilding embodied in the “New Rural Construction” policy, which pays attention to the basic construction projects in the rural areas, while ignoring the social and spiritual life of the people living on the land; the urbanization tendency in the curriculum and education system that are not appropriate in these rural setting. Together with “School Closure and Merger” policy and “Study in City School” policy, it produces inadequate organization and systems of rural education.
Using the data from the research, the paper argues that improving education and life situations of the left-behind children requires rethinking education, the social situation that promotes both local and national value and enables processes of modernization that respects rural life and culture. It explores government’s responsibility of education in resources allocation to improve this situation , promotes modes of participation in the social and educational government, and supports NGO organizations related to left-behind children programs that can be responsive to rural culture, village regulations and folk conventions needed to be rebuilt in public education.

Authors

• Guorui Fan

• Xuelian Liu, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Mingfeng Du, East China Normal University