Talent-Effort Discourse in Chinese County-level High School: Social Text, Field Logic and Student Subjectivity

• In Event: Broken Links in the Pathway from School to Career

Abstract

This study investigates why high-achieving students experience intense anxiety regarding perceived talent and effort. Integrating Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory, Bourdieu’s theorization of field, and Foucault’s work on subjectivity with Critical Discourse Analysis, this qualitative study focused on top students in an elite academic track class at a Chinese county-level high school. The school operates as an educational field where specific logic—driven by structural and administrative pressure—amplifies the paradoxical discourse of talent and effort. This dynamic creates a double bind that alienates student effort into compulsive performance, while reinforcing the elusive idea of talent as the ultimate arbiter of success. However, students are not merely passive; they negotiate their identities and create forms of freedom within constraints.

Authors

• Yan Huang, Peking University

• Ziyue Yang, Peking University