Education of the Excluded: The Educational Paths of Chinese Migrant Children

Date Presented:

Abstract:

Chinese cities have become sites of unprecedented large-scale migration, as Chinese leave their villages in search of jobs, educational opportunities, and modern lives. Although internal migration has been regulated since 1958 under a house-registration system known as hukou, this influx of migrants has provided the supply of low-wage, low-skill workers key to China's development. Not just laborers are migrating, but entire families are relocating. In 2008 there were more than 140,000,000 migrants living in urban areas with 240,000 migrant children in Beijing alone. Excluded from urban services by the registration system, the children of migrant workers are forced into substandard, illegal schools, which, instead of providing the opportunity for upward social mobility, frequently put them behind their rural and urban counterparts. Studying four schools for migrant children in Beijing, I explored how schools are adapting their curricula to teach morals, nationalism, and English, as well as providing exposure to Western culture and establishing post-graduate networks in the hopes of improving the quality of these students in the eyes of the state. Although it is hard to quantify the effectiveness of their curricula and methodologies, it is clear that some schools are attempting to cultivate qualities seen as necessary to be considered a “productive” member of the modern, global Chinese society for these historically excluded students.