"To Walk Out": Rural Parents' Views on Education

Each time that I boarded the second of two public long-distance buses that I took to my research site, I noticed how few seats were left unoccupied. The bus filled quickly with individuals and families carrying and transporting supplies and food from the city back to their villages. Overflowing sacks of clothes, cases of alcohol and other household goods were stowed in the overhead baskets, seats and on people's laps. As the bus meandered along the road, passing small squat buildings and giving way to open land, fellow bus riders asked me where I was going. When I told them that I was going to Shao Xingwen Primary School (SXW), my fellow bus riders would ask if I was a teacher. I would explain that I was not a teacher, but a researcher interested in understanding rural family life and children's schooling. They could not understand my interest in rural life. My fellow bus riders were not the only ones bewildered by my interest in interviewing and studying the life of rural residents; most of my participants, teachers, and county officials often raised the same questions. I usually responded by saying that we know a lot about urban residents, but do not know that much about the lives of rural residents. My answers, however, never seemed to be satisfactory. Rural residents told me that urban families would not only have more to say than rural families, but were more worthy of study. Rural parents found it odd that I choose to live in a rural area when they felt that most rural residents simply wanted to leave rural life for an urban lifestyle. "To Walk Out" During one of my first chats with Mr Zhan, the district education leader, he told me that rural parents have one thought, and that is to have their children "walk out" of the rural areas. Mr Zhan explained to me that after the agricultural production brigades were dissolved, many rural parents participated in basic agricultural training. (1) He believed that this training stimulated parental interest in learning and encouraged parents to have high educational expectations for their children to exit the rural areas. (2) Mr Zhan's words resonated with findings from other studies in rural China, where parents desire social mobility for their children. (3) Past studies have found that rural parents hope their children will leave the countryside (4) and that education will help improve their children's future by helping them secure employment outside of the village. (5) In this paper, using qualitative in-depth interviews and participant observation of rural parents in one rural community, I explore the relationship between rural parents' views on education and their desire for their children "to walk out" (zou chu qu) of rural areas and to go to more developed areas (cities). I draw on Fong's cultural model of modernisation to understand how rural parents understand the role of education for their children's future within China's recent economic, cultural, and social changes. (6) I found that rural parents have developed their own model of modernisation that includes highly valuing education for their children's future, reflecting rural parents' internalisation of China's current modernisation efforts including policy discourse, along with their own life experiences. Rural residents considered their own quality of life lacking compared to what they believed was the good quality of life of urban residents. They explained to me that rural conditions were less developed and that their work and living conditions were "bitter" (ku). (7) The rural parents with whom I worked did not want their children to "eat bitterness" (chi ku) and they viewed getting an education and living in the cities as not only signs of success, but necessary for survival. Rural parents often invoked the adage of "hoping one's child becomes a dragon or phoenix" (8) (wang zi cheng long/ wang nu cheng feng) when they spoke of their reasons for supporting their children's education. …