Cultivating the Difference: Social Class, Parental Values, Cultural Capital and Children's After-School Activities in Taiwan

INTRODUCTIONDuring a regular weekday afternoon at four o'clock, as the children from the Sweet Home Elementary School in Taipei, Taiwan spilled out of the tiny urban campus, the people waiting outside the school gate to pick them up were not their parents. Instead, there were tutors and bus drivers from cram institutes, and Filipino domestic helpers waiting to take their charges to cram schools. Unlike American children, whose extracurricular activities are usually based in their schools, many children in Taipei attend after-school activities after regular school hours. Since most working parents are not able to leave their offices early to transport their children, cram school teachers have become parenting surrogates during the afterschool hours. If we look closely, we see that many children carry one big backpack on their shoulders for school materials, and they usually carry a second satchel stamped with the logo of a cram institute. This second satchel contains textbooks, a workbook, or even a tape recorder for their cram school lessons, held during the late afternoon or early evening. The two backpacks symbolize their second shift: school education during the day and additional learning after school. Every school day, some well-known cram institute chains provide tour buses to pick up their little customers.After-school activities have been a popular form of extracurricular activities in East Asia for the past thirty years. In Taiwan, there are three types of cram institutes: (1) the cram schools that help students to do schoolwork and prepare for entrance exams. They are locally known as Bu-shi-bans.1 (2) the institutes that provide training on foreign languages, and (3) other after-school activity programs: Instead of improving students' academic skills, these activities aim to develop children's artistic talents, athletic skills, or even hobbies, which usually are not included in the official curriculum at school. According to the official statistics on cram institutes in Taiwan, from 2001 to 2010, the number of registered cram institutes grew from 5,788 to 18,528 (Bureau of Education, 2010). Even with the rapid expansion of higher education for the past two decades and a 90% chance of getting into college, every kind of cram school business is growing. They are concentrated around major cities; 29.7% (N=5,507) of the registered institutes are located in metropolitan Taipei. In other words, cram schooling is a well-established commercial market in Taiwan. And due to the lack of public welfare on supplemental learning, there are very few alternatives for Taiwanese parents to choose in terms of how their children spend their after-school time.In this paper, we focus only on the third kind of structured learning beyond the schoolyard, regarding children's talent development. We called these "after-school activities" instead of "cram schooling. " We define after-school activities as children's participation in supplemental learning outside the school campus which usually happens during the weekday evenings or weekends, in privately owned, profit-oriented cram institutes with group settings and adults' supervision. Most parents in Taiwan consider their children's time at cram institutes "should not be wasted without learning anything," even if some parents' original motive to have children stay there is safety and childcare concerns (Shih, 2011). In fact, instead of enrolling their child into cram institutes, privileged families might hire private tutors, but these after-school activities and cram schooling are the more popular practices for most Taiwanese school-age children.For family researchers, children's participation in after-school activities is a "serious business" for contemporary parents (Medrich, Rubin, & Buckley, 1982). The unequal cultural and socioeconomic resources of families, together with the distinctive parenting values that vary by class and race, alter parents' ability to transmit their advantages intergenerationally (Bourdieu, 1977; Lareau, 2000a, 2000b, 2003). …