Terry Woronov

Class Work

Vocational Schools and China's Urban Youth

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

T.E. Woronov is Senior Lecturer of Anthropology at the University of Sydney.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 200
• Erscheinungstermin: 25. November 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 237mm x 161mm x 22mm
• Gewicht: 419g
• ISBN-13: 9780804795418
• ISBN-10: 080479541X
• Artikelnr.: 42797343

Autorenporträt

T.E. Woronov is Senior Lecturer of Anthropology at the University of Sydney.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Numeric Capital
chapter abstract
This chapter presents an overview of the high-stakes exam system that
places up to half of China's secondary school students in vocational
education and seeks to understand the stigmatization of vocational students
in urban China. Refuting the common "culturalist" perspective that
naturalizes Chinese students' desires for ever-increasing educational
credentials as a reflex of traditional Chinese culture, this chapter
instead focuses on the contemporary ideology and policies of human capital
accumulation. The chapter argues that the this ideology turns young people
into a fetish, whereby their exam scores stand for social value, and
replace the child and his/her labor with a number. This regime of value is
called "numeric capital," a term designed to capture both the ideology of
human capital accumulation that specifies a normative life course for young
people of striving for measurable educational and material achievement, and
the state-based structures that make this possible.
2Vocational Schools
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 outlines the history of vocational education in China,
highlighting its roots in Republican-era efforts to limit urban working
classes' aspirations for social mobility. This chapter introduces the
Bridge and Canal Schools, the book's ethnographic research sites, and
discusses the implications of their different institutional settings. While
one school was a contemporary version of a socialist-era "worker training
school," whose graduates were assigned jobs through within the socialist
labor allocation into the work unit (danwei) system, the other was based
entirely on capitalist models of labor reproduction. These different
structures demonstrate some of the ways the socialist and capitalist modes
continue to co-exist and intersect in urban China.
3Vocational Students
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 introduces the students at both schools, focusing on the social
diversity represented in the vocational school classrooms as students from
urban working class, rural, and second-generation migrant families come
together to study. This chapter first challenges the common stereotypes of
vocational secondary students, showing how their decisions to enter
vocational studies mark them as moral and filial youth. Then seeking to
understand the class formations taking place in and through vocational
schools, the chapter argues that the HSEE, the testing regime that fails
vocational students out of the academic stream, acts as a class sorting
mechanism. The exam funnels working-class students, who cannot afford other
options, into vocational schools, while graduates of these schools are
locked out of future white-collar and middle-class jobs, thereby forming a
new sector of the working class.
4Teachers, Teaching and Curriculum
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 discusses teachers and teaching, arguing that teachers'
contractual relationship with their employers (either permanent or
temporary) influenced pedagogy in the schools. the kind of. Permanent
teachers were hired through the socialist "iron rice bowl" system, managed
through redistributive logic and moral suasion. The part-time teachers
worked under a rational capitalist logics, and modeled flexible labor
practices for their students. The chapter examines daily classroom
practice, and shows that both schools "devocationalized" their technical
curricula, by stripping their instruction of actual skills training.
Extending the discussion about class sorting from Chapter 3, this chapter
looks at classes in language standardization in the two schools to show how
these young people were unprepared to enter working-class jobs in the new
service economy.
5Creating Identities
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 looks at how the students think about themselves, and the
question of students' identity. Rather than assuming that the students all
"had" an identity that needed to be "voiced," this chapter argues that the
students' subjectivities had to be actively produced. The chapter explores
the teachers' efforts to get the students to create narratives of
themselves as desiring, choosing subjects, propelled into futures driven by
ever more accumulation of material goods and numeric capital. The students,
however, resisted these efforts, creating identities as moral, filial and
cosmopolitan youth on different terms than those established by their
teachers and dominant middle-class discourse. Chapter 5 explores the
contradictory pressures on the vocational students to both express and
restrain their self expression in key domains, and how these contradictions
are linked to the students' class positions.
6Jobs, Internships, and the School-to-Work Transition
chapter abstract
Chapter 6 follows vocational school graduates as they attended internships,
training classes to prepare for job interviews, job fairs, and to their
first jobs, to understand the school-to-work transition as they entered the
service economy. This chapter explores several key issues that the students
discovered in process of job hunting. First, in the absence of family
connections, they had to negotiate how their vocational credential appealed
to employers, and whether or not their education distinguished them from
rural migrant laborers. Second, although the entry-level service sector
provided seemingly endless opportunity for horizontal mobility, there was
limited opportunity for social or horizontal mobility as they rapidly
switched jobs.
7Precarious China
chapter abstract
Chapter 7 meets some of the vocational school graduates several years
later. This chapter summarizes their experiences as new members of the
urban working class, and compares the vocational school graduates with some
of their age-mates around the world. Arguing that they are forming a new
Chinese "precariat," this chapter positions the students and their lives as
young adults within a global framework of service workers in short-term,
low-paid, tenuous, work. This chapter also explores the question of class
consciousness, arguing that although several factors seem to constrain the
emergence of working-class consciousness among this group of new
service-sector workers, their history of passive resistance in school and
their creative approaches to the challenges of adult life may open the
possibility of new identities and new forms of collective consciousness in
the future.