Prof. Fengshu Liu
Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway
Title: From educational desire to educational anxiety: Rural families aspiring for their offspring’s higher education in China’s remote villages
Abstract:
The dramatic socio-economic changes over the past decades in China coupled with a deep-rooted cultural belief in education have been accompanied by unprecedented educational desire for higher education. Whereas a few previous studies somehow recognize that strong education desire is, or maybe, true of both urban and rural societies, there has been little investigation of how it may be playing out in rural families, especially those in remote areas. Likewise, the ongoing discussion about educational anxiety has solely concerned urban (middle-class) parents, reflecting an assumption that it can hardly apply to rural parents. In keeping with the largely ‘deficit model’ in previous research on rural families and their children’s education, these trends fail to do justice to present-day rural families’ complex relationship and engagement with their children’s education.
This study explores rural (grand)parents’ conceptions and practices concerning their offspring’s education, drawing on in-depth interviews with parents/caretakers in 30 households and participant observation in 6 families who hosted me during my fieldwork in early 2023. The participants typically argued that kaodaxue (getting into college/university) is of paramount importance for their children’s future welfare, or ‘the only way out’. They were determined to do all they can to support their offspring to achieve as much education as possible from a university/college as prestigious as possible. Concomitant to their higher education desire is constant anxiety about their children’s school performance and future education prospects. Anxiety had also to do with their inability to help the child academically. I argue that present-day rural families in remote areas typically show strong educational desire and intense educational anxiety—no less than urban (middle-class) families do. However, the rural educational ‘desire’ and ‘anxiety’ have rural-specific manifestations. Aspiring for higher education for their offspring entails not only tensions and dilemmas, but also strength and resilience, which needs to be situated within their lived experiences of the contemporary Chinese rural society. The findings suggest a much more complex non-deficit picture.
To make sense of the findings, I draw on a more actor-oriented approach to complement the largely macro-institutional account of contemporary families’ orientation towards their children’s education. This is a much-needed approach in order to gain a more grounded and updated understanding of what rural families in China’s remote areas think and do about their offspring’s education.
Biography:
Fengshu Liu is Professor at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Oslo (UiO), Norway. She is the director for the new international Mphil. program in ‘Education and Social Change: Childhood and Youth Studies’ at UiO. She also coordinated the UiO’s international Mphil. program in Comparative and International Education until 2020.
Liu’s research cuts across childhood and youth studies, sociology of education, comparative and international education, and China studies. Much of her work examines the interplay between socio-cultural and institutional changes and children and young people in contemporary societies, with special, but not exclusive, regard to China. More specifically, it studies children’s and young people’s experiences of ‘global modernization’ and how current political, economic, cultural, technological, educational, socio-spatial and demographic processes shape various forms of challenges as well as opportunities for young people. Besides, her work also touches upon such kindred themes as culture and education, Confucian self-cultivation, school culture and gender, and teaching and learning in higher education.
In addition to articles published in highly reputed international journals, she has also authored two books: Urban youth in China: Modernity, the Internet and the self (2011, Routledge), and Modernization as lived experiences: Three generations of young men and women in China (2020, Routledge) as part of her larger project on three generations of young men and women in China and Norway.