Abstract
Especially on the category of education population for those who hold different type of household register under the dualism of household registration (hukou戶口) system, this research focus on the phenomenon of educational stratification in China’s urban junior high school. Following the insights of Neo-Marxism and the theory of cultural capital, this thesis explores the initiative and ideology of children from different family social-economic background that faces structural shackles of educational inequality. This study investigates the initiative and diversity among the individuals and establishes the learning path of different socio-economic background children. Through in-depth interviews with 6 local children, 8 migrant workers’ children and 2 teachers, I collect the data based on various perspectives and scrutinizing the historical context of junior high school development in China. Meanwhile, this study adds a gender perspective to analyze the difference between gender and learning motivation. There are 4 significant contributions in my study. (1) It demonstrates the mechanism for admission and enrollment based on hukou system in urban China junior high school, resulting in non-local hukou holders an unfair chance to compete for the educational resources. (2) The differences of hukou system and family social-economic background leads to a huge learning gap between local children and migrant workers’ children. Most of indigenous children have advanced educational resources. On the contrary, most of migrant workers’ children can only receive limited educational resources. (3) It discovers that Chinese junior high school young boys are similar to Paul Willis’s “lads” by using education as a screening mechanism for capitalism, which leads those lads to counter the school education in order to against the operation of the logic of capitalism. However, he ignored the gender difference within the working class. According to gender/sex differences between children of working-class, girls tend to take strategies, trying to pursue opportunities for class mobility. (4) Willis also didn’t pay attention to the phenomenon of the commercialization of education, public welfare and non-profits school education are becoming profit orientation. Meanwhile, when students face with educational diversion, principals and teachers treat students as the commodity, who exploit and resell students through school recommending or various of illicit means to engage in subtle profitable behavior, which creates the unique educational commercialization phenomenon of junior high schools in China.