Limit of Representation in the Making of "the Marginalized Group" in the Education Equity Discourse in Contemporary China

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

Abstract

In the 18th National Congress of the CPC (Communist Party of China) in 2012, “education equity” as a key word was firstly mentioned to be the new focus in education reform, facing the fact that the developmental distance between different areas and schools was continuously increasing. Based on the belief that education is a promising power to change social hierarchy, it was repeated in the report of central government in 2014 that it was an important task to “make possible that every child has the equal opportunity of development” (“2014年政府工作报告（全文实录）【6】”). Within the discourse of “education equity”, “the marginalized group” in Chinese education as an emerging group of people came into being. The visualization and salvation of this group of people was regarded as a crucial project in the promotion of education equity in China (Yang, 2015, p.1). By borrowing the notion of “visibility of the marginalized group” from the 2010 UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) Report, famous educational expert Yang posited that this global perspective would provide new possibilities for educators to conceptualize and solve the education equity problem in China (p.1).
The belief that “international” and “global” experiences and modes could help solve “local” problems is based on the fact of increasing “global isomorphism” in educational ideologies and systems (Meyer, 2008, p. 34). While these “global” models and classifications may bring new possibilities to solve the “developmental” problems in the modernizing China, what is not often asked is how these problems became problems in the first place. What is not discussed is if we can merely borrow these models and classifications as neutral tools to know what is happening on the people who are distanced by the current educational hierarchy.
As argued by Thomas Popkewitz et al., there is a “conundrum” in the comparative education research, that is to make comparison of the educational phenomena in different countries and societies with the same Western/European Enlightenments’ ideologies (Popkewitz, Khurshid & Zhao, 2012, p.2). To borrow Popkewitz’s argument of the comparative “conundrum”, I want to analyze what kind of Western ideologies and knowledge systems are producing the “marginalized group” as a universal group of people that can be identified despite of their historical, racial and social complexities. By reflecting on the “styles of reasoning” (Hacking, 2002, p. 3) in which the two notions “visibility” and “the marginalized group” are embedded, I want to illustrate the problematic of appropriating these “global” classifications to understand and represent different disadvantaged people in Chinese education. The making of the marginalized people in Chinese educational research, I argue, well demonstrates the dynamic between knowledge and power in creating a kind of “governmentality” (Foucault, 1991, p. 102) that is dominating by representing as well as producing certain groups of people.

Author

• Feiran Dong, University of Wisconsin - Madison