As an educational intervention strategy, gratitude education has been widely adopted in many cultures and throughout history with the aim of arousing gratitude, cultivating gratitude-related behaviours and encouraging material and spiritual reciprocation.Footnote 2 A growing number of empirical studies demonstrate that gratitude education enhances the prosocial and interpersonal capacities of students and promotes social integration.Footnote 3 It is expected that gratitude education can help disadvantaged students, particularly poor and low-income children of rural migrants, gain awareness about gratitude by guiding students to enact mainstream values.Footnote 4 Singing songsFootnote 5 and listening to pep talks about gratitude constitute the school routines encountered by these migrant children, but few scholars have paid attention to school practices, and the exercise of power and social reproduction that play out in these processes have been neglected.
Drawing on ethnographic data collected from one school site in Beijing, this paper examines the reproductive effect of gratitude education. Our main goal is to uncover how discursive constructions of the unfavourable position imposed upon migrant children in the moral life reflect and perpetuate their disadvantaged social status compared to urbanites. Migrant children have been granted access to urban public schools in recent years, and they have become “newcomers” in the education system following rural-urban migration with their migrant-worker parents. As Georg Simmel suggests, newcomers are “strangers” in the host community because they live near locals, but the sociocultural distance between the two groups is strikingly large.Footnote 6 Migrant children, as strangers in the urban education system, are exposed to systematic discrimination and unfair treatment.Footnote 7 They are often shunned and excluded as if they were dangerous enemies who will take educational resources in cities from urbanites. Nonetheless, some existing studies have explored the equal or superior status of migrant children.Footnote 8
If urbanites neither shun poor migrants as hostile strangers nor accept them as associates or friends, how do they interact with migrant students in school contexts? Katherine Swancutt described herself as a “captive guest” when a key informant infringed her freedom (of entering and exiting the research site) to serve his self-interested motives.Footnote 9 By adding a moral dimension to this notion, we propose in this paper that a new conception of “the morally captive guest” is needed to characterize such relationships between urbanites and migrant children. Despite purported efforts to treat migrant students and locals equally, by launching gratitude education, the school confines migrant children to the position of beneficiaries who owe a moral debt to urbanites. This positioning is achieved by transforming institutionalized inequalities that subjugate migrant children into their perceived moral deficiencies and undesirable attitudes. At the same time, migrant children are understood as an instrument for attracting resources and enhancing a school's public profile in the educational hierarchy.
This paper delineates the experience of the morally captive guest that is constructed discursively by gratitude education in an urban school of largely poor and low-income migrant children. Educational discourses reflect power relations, mainstream awareness and the alliance between school authorities and teachers.Footnote 10 Findings suggest that the exercise of power directs the day-to-day praxis of gratitude education in service of the reproduction of class relations. We make two contributions to the extant literature on gratitude education and citizenship. First, far from being an unbiased intervention, gratitude education reveals itself as a school practice manipulated by authorities to align students to fit the graduated citizenship. The discursive construction of the beneficiary-benefactor relationship in the hidden curriculum denies rural migrants urban citizenship, rendering them second-class citizens. Second, invoking a Foucauldian account of discourse and power, this paper provides new empirical insight to studies on class reproduction via the production and transmission of educational discourses.
The Role of Schools in Teaching Gratitude and Citizenship
Whether their political systems are liberal democratic or oligarchic, all countries regard citizenship education as an important component of the school curriculum and the ultimate objective of schooling.Footnote 11 Schools bear the responsibility for cultivating citizens who will master the most acceptable forms of behaviour and values, including the civic virtue of gratitude, and who will adapt their social and personal lives to meet the needs of national development strategies. Surprisingly, the similarities between Chinese citizenship education and that of other nation-states are more striking than the differences. Neo-liberal doctrines direct school curricula across countries, in which personal success in the global market economy has been prioritized as a pursuable goal.Footnote 12 Nonetheless, an extensive body of literature concludes that citizenship education in China is deeply politicized in nature, and a state-sponsored, required subject called moral education (political education, or ideological education) operates as a socio-political instrument.Footnote 13 This subject equips Chinese students with state-sanctioned viewpoints on national cohesion, value orientations, citizenship rights and responsibilities, democracy, and occupational and family ethics.Footnote 14
As part of citizenship education, gratitude education transmits educable and learnable virtues through instruction and learning practices that constitute the official and hidden curricula in schools. Through the school's implementation of various educational strategies, students are guided to ponder their relationships with benefactors from a perspective of gratitude and to repay them with grateful words and deeds.Footnote 15 Commonly applied strategies to inspire gratitude among students include having gratitude visits, reading gratitude books, writing gratitude essays or diaries, doing a good deed for benefactors and counting blessings. Gratitude education has been consistently understood as the centrepiece of moral education because gratitude is the leading virtue.Footnote 16 Given that public schools aim to cultivate positive moral sentiments and habits, it is legitimate to promote gratitude education in the school context in all nation-states.
Nonetheless, scholars warn that schools should not design a set of procedures through which students express insincere gratitude in mechanical ways. Instead, schools should foster “an affectively grounded trait-like capacity to feel thankful or want to show sincere appreciation on appropriate occasions of benefaction.”Footnote 17 Likewise, Mark Jonas defines gratitude as the emotional experience of an individual regardless of the behaviours of benefactors. Thus, she recommends that educators should “cultivate a disposition towards gratitude rather than following a moral requirement.”Footnote 18
More importantly, it is arguably inadequate for schools to require students to reciprocate their benefactors.Footnote 19 Kant opposes the unidirectional mode from the goodwill or good deeds of benefactors to the gratitude of and repayment by beneficiaries.Footnote 20 He contends that the consensus claiming that recipients must reciprocate leads to a counterproductive outcome by entrapping beneficiaries into ceaseless indebtedness and worsening their already adverse circumstances. In contrast, the reciprocation mode moves beyond the debt accountFootnote 21 by treating both the beneficiary and the benefactors as equal subjects in the moral life. In this view, the beneficiaries respect and compliment the goodwill of the giver and recognize that the benevolent act also benefits the giver, whereas the benefactors are grateful to the recipients for accepting their help. This circulation of reciprocity does not negate the importance of repayment but rather highlights the appreciation of heartfelt gratitude on the level of mutual recognition. Thus, gratitude education should be a form of reciprocal love rather than responsibility or debt.
What distinguishes gratitude education in Chinese schools from its foreign counterparts is its intrinsic link with moral education, a compulsory curriculum for students of all ages and levels in the country. Noting that gratitude graces only a few pages in moral education textbooks, school authorities have the freedom to determine whether to undertake gratitude education as part of school-based curricula (xiaoben kecheng 校本课程) and to determine its form and content in their schools. In the case of China, gratitude education takes the form of a hidden curriculum consisting of unofficial expectations, the implicit values and norms of school authorities, and unintended outcomes and messages accompanied by the expressions and responses of these expectations and values.Footnote 22 Although this education is completely invisible in the curriculum, it encourages students to perform expected duties in a subtle but influential way.
Another factor that complicates the picture of gratitude education in China is the state-society relation, which is distinct from that in Western countries. Martin Jacques concludes that China's people tend to personify the state as the “patriarch of the family,” an intimate but respectful moral sage rather than as an intruder.Footnote 23 As a result, it is hoped that citizens will be grateful to the state because of the benefits and rights they acquire and thus will be willing to sacrifice for the collective good. This state-society relation discourages rights-conscious behaviour and values and presumably disempowers individuals through the severe deprivation of citizenship rights and entitlements.
Despite the aforementioned similarities and differences, Chinese gratitude education (and that of other countries) is embedded in the reproductive function of schools, meaning that schools channel students towards social status in accordance with their class backgrounds. As Paul Willis argues, “As long as the burden of selection/sorting/examination is placed on schooling in an unequal and class society, then the ‘Reproduction’ perspective must be taken into account.”Footnote 24 On the one hand, schools perpetuate the phenomenon of graduated citizenship. In hierarchical societies, dominant and disadvantaged groups enjoy differential citizenship rights.Footnote 25 To maintain their privileged status, dominant groups assign powerless others a lesser set of rights with institutional barriers.Footnote 26 After relocating in cities, migrant children have been deprived of citizenship rights to equal access to a state-subsidized education. Although recent educational policies require urban public schools to accommodate migrant children, most of these children end up attending low-performing, lower-ranked schools.Footnote 27 Migrant children, in this sense, are treated as second-class citizens in the urban education system, whereas their urban counterparts secure a quality education.
On the other hand, while dominant groups limit access to certain educational rights, they wield their power to construct knowledge and discourses to build support and loyalty and to maintain privilege. For Foucault, objective and value-free knowledge is non-existent; the function of knowledge lies in its disciplinary and manipulative effects, turning people into the subjects of power.Footnote 28 On this basis, he proceeds to interrogate “how power is exercised” in institutions such as schools. Schools are confined blocks where the extent of the exercise of power is maximized through the relationships of communications by applying objective capacities (for example, schooling buildings, gates, windows) and human capacities (for example, rewards, punishment, dividing practices). As Roger Deacon explicates:Footnote 29
Such institutions, where relations of power and knowledge come to support and link up with each other in more or less constant ways, form what Foucault called “blocks of capacity-communication-power.” These “regulated and concerted systems” fuse together the human capacity to manipulate words, things and people, adjusting abilities and inculcating behaviour via “regulated communications” and “power processes,” and in the process structuring how teaching and learning take place. What distinguishes educational institutions from prisons, armies, and hospitals is that the former emphasizes “communication” above “capacity” and “power.”
As a proxy of school knowledge, educational discourses refer to the communication and meanings reflective of dominant standpoints in the forms of languages and texts at school sites. Discourses join knowledge and power to inculcate in students a set of rules and concepts conducive to their recognition of social hierarchies.Footnote 30 Seen in this light, school education mainly transmits values constituting the mainstream mindset held by those who win the power to prescribe the content of communication and meanings. In other words, an intimate interplay between knowledge and power is created, maintained and transmitted through discourses pertaining to what can and cannot be said in social life.Footnote 31 As “an instrument and an effect of power,” the dominant discourses in school are indicative of inclusive and exclusive strategies through which certain conversations, claims and meanings are prioritized to replace contested others.Footnote 32 In this regard, as part of the socially constructed school knowledge, discourses of gratitude education tend to silence the disadvantaged, positioning them as the morally captive guest.
Setting and Research Methods
Red River Middle School (a pseudonym; hereafter, Red River) is an urban public school located on the Third Ring Road in Beijing.Footnote 33 It is categorized as a “weak school” (boruo xiao 薄弱校) in policy documents. More than 90 per cent of Red River students come from poor and low-income migrant households. Urban students shun Red River due to its low rank in the school district. Urban parents actively engage in school choice, and they use every means to secure their children a spot in high-performing schools. Principal Wang commented on the remaining students: “Those who stay are the children from the poorest family backgrounds. Their parents are either poverty-stricken or have no supportive social network. Basically, they don't have enough resources to select schools for their children.” Red River has received migrant children since 2008, avoiding school mergers and the unemployment of teachers as a result of its severe student shortage.
To qualify for admission into Red River, migrant children must take entrance exams, reach or exceed the threshold scores, and then submit five kinds of certificates (wuzheng 五证): a temporary living certificate, proof of residence, a family-planning certificate (or one-child certificate), employment certificate (or business permit) and their parents’ marriage certificate. In 2001, the Ministry of Education proposed the “two mainlines” (liangweizhu 两为主) policy, suggesting that the local governments and public schools of hosting cities play key roles in safeguarding the basic education of migrant children. To implement the policy, the local government requires weak schools such as Red River to accommodate migrant children. Since then, Red River has abolished entrance exams, and students who are unable to provide all certificates can access the school.
From the perspectives of Principal Wang and the teachers, the strong interference of the local government caused a dilemma for the school. The policy constraints prevent migrant children from taking high school entrance examinations in Beijing and simultaneously disqualify Red River from competing with other schools on test scores. To survive and develop in this restrictive situation, Red River designed and implemented gratitude education as a new strength to distinguish itself from other weak schools and to make up for its weakness in academic competition due to the matriculation of low-performing students. As its education scheme has received publicity, Red River has received increased attention, resources and positive comments from the local government.
For this research, the first author conducted 13 months of fieldwork in Red River from February to September 2011, from April to June 2012, and from May to June 2016. When the author first entered the school, it catered to 545 students and was led by 45 teachers. At that time, the numbers of seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade students were 282, 174 and 85, respectively. In 2016, the number of teachers remained unchanged, whereas the number of students dropped to 484. During the years, students welcomed the first author into their school and personal lives as a friend-researcher. The research methods were composed of semi-structured interviews and participant observations with 18 migrant children, 15 teachers, 8 school administrators and 11 urban students. In-depth interviewing was conducted in the most natural setting possible, such as classrooms, the student activity room, the playground and teachers’ offices. To ensure prolonged engagement and ongoing observations, the first author spent a total of 273 days observing subject courses, sports meetings, donation ceremonies, class meetings, parent-teacher conferences and other gratitude-education-related events and practices. Due to the trust established during the research process, research participants voluntarily shared with the first author miscellaneous artefacts, such as school policy documents, copies of speeches of school administrators, teachers’ lesson plans, and essays and diaries written by migrant children.
The first author completed all one-on-one interviews in Mandarin Chinese, a widely spoken language among migrant children in Beijing. A total of 368 hours of audio-recordings of interviews were transcribed verbatim in Chinese and, together with the field-visit notes, were translated into English selectively as needed to present the findings. For the sake of confidentiality, all identifying information was removed by assigning pseudonyms while translating and transcribing. Throughout the fieldwork, the first author took reflective notes and analytic memos, made observational comments and wrote summaries of observations and interviews to compose the field logs.Footnote 34 This functioned as the initial process of data analysis in an attempt to condense the raw data into potential key data elements by identifying tentative coding categories. Guided by traditional qualitative analysis techniques,Footnote 35 we read through all coded and segmented logs many times to obtain a holistic view of the overall data. In addition, we developed diagrams to visualize intricate links between emerging coding categories listed with their associated events, processes and revealing narratives indented from transcriptions and notes. The use of techniques such as member checks and searches for disconfirming evidence improved the validity and credibility of the themes elaborated below.Footnote 36
Practising Gratitude in Education: School, Teachers and Migrant Parents under the Gratitude-Education Discourse
Despite advocacy for equal treatment from policy directives, as the strangers in urban public schools, migrant children suffer from stereotypical labelling and expectations in school education.Footnote 37 At Red River, gratitude education lumped its migrant intake into a poverty-stricken, homeless “floating population” (liudong renkou 流动人口).Footnote 38 The imposition of this identity marker, which is reflective of the various institutional barriers poor rural migrants face in China's cities, affected the day-to-day interactions between urbanites and migrants in the school site. Based on the prescribed school knowledge and discourses, Red River practised gratitude in schooling to equate the disadvantaged social position of migrant children with their supposed intrinsic inferiority and moral deficiencies. Consequently, this educational programme positioned the students as morally captive guests by silencing their voices.
Because it accommodates poor and low-income migrant children, Red River described itself as a school in need of social support and therefore found opportunities to attract resources and enhance its public profile. With this enhanced public profile, Red River became a model school established by the local education bureau and was assigned to organize district-wide activities. During the fieldwork, the first author observed the large-scale activity of the opening ceremony of a sports meeting. Approximately 300 seventh- and eighth-grade students performed group calisthenics and a fun race during the event. School principals and student representatives from 32 other weak schools participated. They received sports equipment and goods from activity sponsors. An eighth-grade student named Yi Liu felt aggrieved at being treated unfairly in the activity. She recalled:
We felt disgusted at that activity. We were despised for our poor status. Especially the student speech, read by my classmate Shan Tang, made us seem poor and abject. She read it in the tone a teacher taught her. She said [imitating Shan's sobbing tone], “Teachers, fellow classmates, hello everyone.” It seemed that she was so sad and so pathetic. She even said, “We are grateful that the school has taken us in.” It sounded like we are abandoned children. Had it not been for this school taking us in with great kindness, we would have to wander the street all day long. Come on! We just don't have the Beijing hukou, but our situation is not as bad as having nowhere to go. If I didn't make it here, I would be in Xinmiao [a migrant-run school in the school district].
In line with the Foucauldian account of the mutually constitutive relationship between discourse and power, educational discourses reflect and perpetuate the privilege of dominant groups and help to reproduce unequal social relations. In the student's speech, the statement “We are grateful that the school has taken us in” confirmed the advantaged position of Red River with regard to its educational resources and moral stance. On the contrary, migrant children have limited access to urban public education due to their agricultural hukou status, and they are expected to express gratitude towards Red River for being given a valuable educational opportunity in Beijing. Obviously, many students felt as confused and repelled as Yi Liu about this imposed moral obligation. Some even cursed at the scene so that teachers had to step out to deter the angry students from influencing others.
The gratitude-education knowledge centred on two themes: gratitude towards the school and gratitude towards teachers. As indicated above, students’ gratitude to the school was part of the daily activities in the school. To motivate students to love their school and class, activities such as weekly diaries and essay competitions directed them to write about positive life changes in their transition from migrant-run schools to Red River.Footnote 39 In their essays, students wrote laudatory sentences about the physical environment of Red River compared with the poorly conditioned migrant-run schools they previously attended. However, they showed a strong aversion to the gratitude education. For instance, students perceived their enrolment in Red River as the result of a policy change; however, to their dismay, gratitude education disregarded the policy change and instilled in them the educational discourse that public schools are altruistic and offer a shelter for abandoned, homeless children. The alleged “homeless” state of migrant students was inconsistent with their self-perceived simple, happy urban lives. Thus, students rejected the call for gratitude imposed upon them by the school.
On the one hand, Red River did not encourage the students to express thankfulness to their parents. Principal Wang explained:
The migration with their parents drags them down… Parents are willing to give their kids a great environment. They feel Beijing is a great place. Staying here enables their kids to grow and study in a great environment. I believe all parents [in this country] are willing to devote everything for their kids. But if their goals are short term, [such as] ensuring their kids a good middle-school education, this irrational decision certainly ruins their children [because] their kids have to go back to rural hometowns to attend senior high schools and take college entrance examinations.
The gratitude education scheme endorses exclusive institutional arrangements that stigmatize the migration of rural people as unwise. Under this logic, short-sighted, “irrational” parents do not deserve their children's gratitude. It is on this ground that migrant parents are presented as a cautionary example of how not to plan life with a view towards external constraints.
On the other hand, the school demands that migrant students express gratitude to their teachers. Many migrants achieved low test scores, but they are not allowed to attend academic high schools in Beijing due to harsh policy constraints. Moreover, given the temporary school register (linshi xueji 临时学籍) granted to migrants in Beijing, their achievements are not considered in evaluating school performance. Moreover, teachers see themselves as investing more time and energy when dealing with low-performing students. However, compared to the understanding and support the teachers once received from urban parents, they receive much less from migrant-worker parents; hence, they take gratitude from the students for granted to compensate for their hard work. Throughout the fieldwork, teachers condemned migrant students as ungrateful and unworthy of their work. Over time, teachers showed low motivation and passive attitudes towards teaching migrant children. Many treated their job as a springboard to better teaching posts. Others mocked themselves for making an altruistic sacrifice for the greater good.
Gratitude education and social reproduction
From a Foucauldian point of view, power relations are maintained via the generation and transmission of educational discourses, resulting in the strengthening of the class privilege of the advantaged. This study problematizes the supposed neutrality of gratitude-education discourses and explores its effects and consequences in terms of reproducing educational and social inequalities. At Red River, knowledge and discourses reproduce unequal class relations in two aspects. Educational discourses portray migrant children as pathetic students longing for schooling and accommodating migrant children in Red River as a kind-hearted act of beneficence. Confined to the position of beneficiaries, migrant children feel powerless to freely play roles and take responsibilities in the moral life, becoming “the morally captive guests.” In other words, poor migrants and urbanites are not equal subjects in the moral community. Non-agricultural hukou status entitles urbanites to monopolize urban citizenship and city resources, whereas migrants can rely only on the occasional kindness of urbanites to access educational opportunities.
It is crucial to examine the legitimacy of the alleged give-and-take relationship between Red River and migrant students. Two facts undermine the legitimacy of gratitude education. First, the school enrolled migrant children for its own survival. As addressed above, the general problem weak schools in Beijing constantly face is student shortage. In recent decades, the decreasing birth rate of urbanites and the increasing number of urban parents engaging in school choice have caused redundancies among weak schools and their teachers, producing enrolment opportunities for migrant children. To survive in the system, weak schools must accept poor rural migrants. Gratitude education at Red River concealed and glossed over this self-interest-oriented decision making.
Second, Red River has been forced to accommodate migrant children due to policy interference. Although some scholars suspect that the “two mainlines” policy may exacerbate class distinctions within migrant populations,Footnote 40 the policy exerts positive impacts by ensuring the inescapable responsibility of urban public schools in educational provision for rural migrants. It is reported that approximately 80.4 per cent of migrant children in the country have successfully enrolled in urban public schools that were previously closed to them.Footnote 41 Throughout the fieldwork, administrators and teachers at Red River positioned migrant children as “uneducable” students with dim hope in academic studies, and they were increasingly worried about the prospects of the school and their own careers. Red River should admit that accommodating migrant students has relieved it of the crisis of the school merger and the unemployment of teachers. This recognition would problematize the urban-biased moral position in gratitude education.
Moreover, gratitude education at Red River stipulates desirable student reciprocation, which effectively reproduces the low social status that is already expected of rural migrants. In the interviews, teachers commented negatively on the academic performance and moral stature of migrant students. When asked about the best way to repay the school and teachers, Ms Pei, a headteacher of seventh grade students, stated the following:
We do not expect these kids to obtain high scores. They do not have a solid foundation of knowledge. Even if we put all efforts in helping with their studies, it's impossible for them to obtain ideal scores. If you want them to compete with others [urban students], they will suffer from low self-esteem. Therefore, our school shifts the focus of the work onto moral education. These students and their parents are perhaps hostile to society. They may not fully understand [how society works]. This results from their own attitude, the mentality of the social underclass. So we hope that school education can help them become physically and mentally healthy persons. Students see themselves as part of the social underclass. We want them to be a law-abiding underclass who have good character.
“Social underclass” was a term frequently used when teachers talked about the current state and future class status of migrant students. The purported “mentality of social underclass” legitimized the knowledge and discourses of gratitude education, which contributed to the perpetuation of the privilege of urbanites. The power governing urban-rural dichotomies in larger society operates on the level of awareness in teacher-student interactions and further solidifies existing class relations. In other words, the desire of urbanites to maintain their own interests and educational opportunities is reflected in the practices of gratitude education.
The stereotypical judgements and low expectations of the teachers strengthen the disadvantaged position of poor rural migrants in unequal class relations. This situation is reminiscent of empirical studies on the correlations between low expectations of students by teachers and mediocre student performance.Footnote 42 Due to the dysfunctional educational programme, the positive social functions of schooling in helping students to move up the social ladder are non-existent.Footnote 43 Beijing denies migrant students the opportunity to take college entrance examinations and Red River stresses moral education over academic education, thereby reducing students’ possibility of realizing upward social mobility in the largely exam-oriented education system of the country. With the exception of a few academically oriented students who return to their rural hometowns for further studies, the remaining majority will enter the urban labour market and constitute the new generation of migrant workers.Footnote 44 To repay Red River, which provided them with educational opportunities, migrant students are expected to follow in their parents’ footsteps in terms of occupying social positions at the bottom of the urban hierarchy.
Reconstructing Gratitude Education: Bringing the Subjectivities of the Students Back In
The school knowledge and discourses delivered by gratitude education transfer the moral requirement onto migrant children, from whom Red River expects to receive gratitude. The school and its teachers intend to shape the awareness and experiences of migrant children; however, the schooling is disconnected from the living world of the students. It neglects and represses the subjectivities of the students, lumping them together as morally captive guests in the urban education system.
Resistant attitudes and behaviours towards schooling were ubiquitous among Red River students. They exuded weariness and depression towards school education as a result of the glaring contradiction they sensed between inculcation at school and the gratitude they wished to express. For example, whereas gratitude education labelled migrant parents as “irrational” and short-sighted, many students appreciated their parents’ tenacious efforts in adversity.Footnote 45 They understood that their parents raised them in hardship while trying to make ends meet in the city. As illustrated above, scholars consider gratitude education an effective intervention at school;Footnote 46 however, schools should fully respect the subjectivities and initiatives of the students to incorporate their genuine gratefulness. To reposition migrant children as active agents in gratitude education, the following analysis brings their voices back in.
Gratitude towards parents: unsilencing the voices of migrant children
In many migrant households, the parent-child relationship is strained. There are various reasons for this undesirable situation. First, some children are left behind in rural hometowns for an extended period of time while their parents work in cities, creating a strong sense of estrangement between the children and parents. Second, some parents neglect the emotional demands of the children, and their heavy workload presents obstacles to consistent communication with their children. Third, the migrant literature finds that compared to their parents, migrant children are more willing to adapt and more versatile in adapting to urban lives. Thus, an “acculturation gap” exists between the two generations. At Red River, migrant children who stayed in Beijing for more than two years were inclined to speak Mandarin with a slight Beijing accent. When parents talked with them in local dialects, they replied automatically in Mandarin. Throughout the fieldwork, the first author heard many times that students who felt at ease in their urban lives complained about impolite behaviours of their parents, such as spitting in public and running red lights. Nonetheless, many children understood the hardship encountered by their parents, who worked all day long, and they were aware that the better material life they enjoyed was at the price of parental supervision. Ying Xie, a ninth-grade student, wrote about deeply buried gratitude towards her parents:
I seldom talk to my parents. I prefer talking to my older sister. She knows that I don't get along well with my parents [because] I am dissatisfied with them on many things. My mother gave birth to two girls, yet she prefers boys to girls. They live in Beijing, but they are still rural people in terms of lifestyle…. I have difficulties with my parents, but I am grateful to them for bringing me to Beijing. I like my current life. I used to [from six to twelve years old] live in [rural] hometown. I lived on my own. My aunt cooked for me. My grandpa washed my clothes on weekends. They always quarrelled about money and complained that my mother did not give them enough money. Every time they fought, I called my parents and begged them to take me [to Beijing].
Those who built intimate relationships with their parents conveyed gratitude in direct ways and were determined to give back the parental love:
I've always been happy to live in Beijing, where I don't need to worry about anything and my mother takes good care of me. She gets up early to cook delicious meals, so I don't need to go out for food…. The most important thing that ever happened to me in the 15 years of my life was to move to this prosperous metropolis. If I had not come to Beijing, I would not have enjoyed the excellent education resources, and I would not have learned so much knowledge. So I think that the most significant event for me is their choice to bring me to Beijing. How can I not study hard when my parents are so nice to me? I study to make them happy. My goal is to study hard and go to university. After that, I will make money to help my parents.
Whether their intergenerational relationships were strained or harmonious, migrant students admitted that being brought to Beijing tremendously changed their life trajectories. They were grateful for the positive changes and experiences that accompanied their parents’ choice. In contrast, Red River teachers accused migrant parents of making an “irrational” decision in view of restricted policies that deprive migrants of opportunities to receive secondary education in the city. This perspective leaves unchallenged the unequal distribution of educational resources in the country. By condemning the victims of educational inequality, it maintains the privilege enjoyed exclusively by urbanites.
The migrant students’ gratitude towards their parents encouraged the researchers to examine the mindset of the student group from a positive perspective. Although the students experience structural constraints that presumably entrap them in psychological denial or deviation, some beneficial aspects of urban life broaden the students’ horizons, expand their knowledge, and breed confidence and courage. For some children who experienced long-term separation from their parents, family reunification provided a constant source of happiness and support. To restore family links, they tried hard, manifesting their strong longing for family love. This partly explains why migrant students show a strong sense of happiness.Footnote 47 Student diaries suggest that regaining parental love may encourage the students to pass on the virtue of filial piety.
Resistance towards school education among migrant children and parents
As noted above, Red River imposed the moral burden of gratitude on the migrant children on the grounds that the school offered them educational opportunities. However, the students refused this inculcation. On the one hand, even with a superior physical environment, weak schools do not guarantee the students a desirable educational experience.Footnote 48 On the other hand, attending such public schools fails to improve the academic performance of the students but rather triggers dissatisfaction among migrant parents. The inadequate prioritization of gratitude education in Red River coupled with the poor knowledge base of many children were attributed to this situation. Generally speaking, the teaching quality of urban public schools is higher than that of migrant-run schools. Due to the stricter examination regulations implemented in public schools, migrant children score much lower than students in migrant-run schools, which makes parents underestimate the former's teaching quality.Footnote 49 During our interviews, migrant parents referred to the higher scores their children achieved in migrant-run schools to prove their judgement. Additionally, migrant schools tend to stigmatize public schools for putting themselves at an advantage in the competition for student enrolment. Due to growing suspicion and discontent, some parents refused to show up at parent-teacher conferences or rejected home visits.
Migrant children did not try to hide their fading hopes about school education. They felt that gratitude education put little effort into academic education. In reality, their attitude towards Red River underwent a gradual change. At the beginning, they were delighted and grateful to attend an urban public school in Beijing. Over time, they found it difficult to improve their performance when they were exposed to a moral-education-centred school atmosphere. Foreseeing gloomy prospects, migrant children resisted the school's education. From gratitude to resistance, this changing attitude highlights the widespread disillusion among rural migrants regarding educational equality in the city. They anticipated not only enrolling in public schools but also enjoying the equal opportunity for intellectual and moral development. Nan Zhang, an eighth-grade student, described her resistance to the schooling:
My home is far away from school. I get up at 5 o'clock every morning to take the subway. There is a school near my home, but my mum says it's not good. So I come to this school. But this one is not good either. Our headteacher keeps nagging about [the importance of] discipline. She says nothing about exams. It seems that she doesn't care about our test scores. Other teachers are just like her. [This is] because we don't have a Beijing hukou. It is meaningless for them to improve our performance because we will go back to hometowns around Grade Eight or Nine…. I feel like studying here is a waste of time, youth and money. Leave earlier and you are free earlier.
Migrant students sensed that urban teachers held little passion for teaching them. The poor performance of the students seemingly catalysed the low teacher morale. The source of the tension-laden relationship between students and teachers is the institutional exclusion faced by the students in the urban education system. Since migrant children do not have the local hukou, their academic scores cannot be incorporated to assess school and teacher performance. Thus, some children have been ill-treated in urban public schools.Footnote 50 Red River placed migrant children and urban students in separate classes to implement different academic assistance and career guidance. Although teachers did not completely support this tracking system, none of them intervened in the school policy. As educators, they held the belief that education should foster individuals’ upward mobility. However, their attention to immediate interests shattered the educational ideal.
Through words and deeds, migrant students conveyed their strong frustration towards the school education led by gratitude training. They felt hopeless about continuing their studies and became bored at school. Because teachers reported truancy to the parents, migrant children rarely skipped classes. However, when sitting in class, their learning attitude was passive. Few students paid attention to class content, and most read novels, fiddled with their smart phones or passed notes. Even fewer expected to excel at school since most students dreamed only of a pass grade. Throughout the fieldwork, the first author witnessed students interrupting teachers’ lectures at will or bickering out loud in class. To manage the class, teachers ordered the unruly students to write self-criticism about misbehaving or sent them to their offices for time-outs. These measures were counterproductive because many students irritated teachers on purpose to leave the classroom.
Urban students as a marginalized group
Gratitude education in Red River failed to win the recognition of migrant students. Positioned as morally captive guests, these students possessed an inferior position in moral life and were seen as an instrument to attract attention and resources for their low-ranked school. As the school education has been tailored to the supposed moral deficiencies of rural migrants, the small intake of urban students in the school has been marginalized.
Ms Dai, the headteacher of a seventh-grade class, shared an incident with the first author. One day, she read her students a school document on gratitude education in which all students were called “migrant children.” After her reading, an urban student stood up, pointed at the migrant students, and shouted furiously, “Why are you calling us migrant children? They are migrant children!” Other urban students agreed, “We are not migrant children!” Ms Dai concluded: “I understand why they reacted like that. They were not comfortable with being called migrant children, so they let out their anger. But I noticed that none of the migrant children stood up to talk back. They sat there innocently. [I think] they must have had a bad feeling inside.”
Although all students were critical of the school education, migrant and urban students did not rely on each other. This was partly because the voices of urban students had been completely submerged in the educational scheme that targeted migrant children. Bingbing Chen, an urban student, explained why he disliked his migrant counterparts:
If they were in their own migrant schools, they would be happier. Those schools are full of students like them. They came here to study and turned this place into a migrant school, which scared Beijing students away. People who want to donate and listen to classes come here for them, not for us. Ms Kong [an English teacher] said they will be allowed to take the college entrance examination in Beijing in the future. Well, if the policy really says so, whether I support it or not means nothing. But I think that even if they have the opportunity, they are not capable of going to college.
Urban students transferred their blame to migrant students, the scapegoats of dysfunctional schooling, and this blame made apparent the clash between the two student groups. In contrast to migrant students as morally captive guests, the marginal state of urban students was due to their lack of socio-economic capital. Given the low-quality schooling, their disadvantaged status within the class structure became more visible. The content of gratitude education was disconnected from the reality of both urban and migrant students and was unable to increase their awareness of gratitude.
Conclusion
Through gratitude education, the exercise of power transmits school knowledge and discourses to perpetuate the extant class relations in tandem with the urban-rural dualism that governs the country. In this case of educating migrant children, power operates in two aspects. First, it produces the educational discourse that weak schools such as Red River supply students with the only educational opportunity in Beijing, which distorts the lawful obligation undertaken by the school of a benefactor-and-recipient relationship. According to the “two mainlines” policy and subsequent inclusion initiatives, public schools in hosting cities should take solid measures to safeguard the basic education of migrant children.Footnote 51 In Beijing, local governments have ordered public schools, particularly lower-ranked ones, to accommodate school-aged migrant children.Footnote 52
In addition, Red River's gratitude education glosses over its self-interested decision to accept the students, disregarding the fact that the school suffers from a severe student shortage due to its undesirable public profile among urban families. This evidence undermines the legitimacy of gratitude education in the school. Exposed to such schooling, as Kant rightly argues,Footnote 53 migrant children will be entrapped in a plight of ceaseless indebtedness, worsening their already adverse circumstances. In other words, gratitude education, in this case, positions migrant children as morally captive guests who are supposed to express gratitude towards urbanites and repay their kindness in action. It grants rural migrants an inferior position in moral life. The imposition of this disadvantaged position helps to legitimize the various forms of educational and social inequalities migrant children encounter in their current and future lives. Regardless of whether the students accept the gratitude education, due to an inadequate emphasis on moral training, this urban schooling reproduces class relations whereby urban privilege can be effectively maintained by directing migrant students to veer off the academic track.
As the ethnographic data indicate, migrant students resist the class-based knowledge and discourses in gratitude education as well as the overall school education. They sense the disdain and low expectations of teachers, and their tension-laden relationship with teachers continues to exist in vocational schools.Footnote 54 About the reification of student resistance, as Terry Woronov and Minhua Ling suggest, resistance of migrant students towards low-quality schooling is characterized by their endeavours to pursue more education and/or work in service jobs lest they follow in their parents’ footsteps, but this topic is beyond the scope of this article.Footnote 55 Schooling at Red River silences their subjectivities and imposes an unbearable moral responsibility on their shoulders. Through a series of educational policies promoting the equal treatment of migrant populations in urban schools, lower-ranked, weak schools tend to be the final resort for most poor and low-income migrants.Footnote 56 In tandem with the disadvantaged position of rural migrants in urban hierarchies, Red River confined migrant students to subordinate status under the guise of adapting to their educational needs. Serving the interests of urbanites, Red River accepted rural migrants in name only. Meantime, the implementation of urban-biased gratitude education distinguished rural migrants from the urban school and created discrepancies and conflicts between migrant students and urbanites. Overall, by meticulously analysing the interaction between educational discourses and power in school practices, this school ethnography contributes to the understandings of the reproductive effects of school education in the sense that school sites are fraught with class-based meaning makings, which might serve as a catalyst for student resistance and educational change.
Acknowledgement
The authors thank three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy's 21st Century China Center for its support. Research for this article was made possible by a National Education Science 13th Five-Year Plan Grant of the Chinese Ministry of Education for Youth Project, entitled “A longitudinal research on the impact of educational experiences on social mobility of children of rural migrant workers” (no. EAA170429).
Biographical note
Miao LI is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and adjunct researcher at the Institute of Governance at Shandong University. She received a PhD in social foundations from State University of New York at Buffalo. Her research interests include moral education, youth culture, citizenship education, class formation, social mobility, and qualitative research methodology. She is the author of the book Citizenship Education and Migrant Youth in China: Pathways to the Urban Underclass (Routledge, 2015). Her articles appear in Citizenship Studies, Eurasian Geography and Economics, and Cultural Review (Beijing).
Yihan XIONG is a professor in the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University. His research interests focus on politics of migration, political participation and ethnic conflicts. His articles appear in The China Quarterly, Security Studies, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Citizenship Studies and the Japanese Journal of Political Science.
