Abstract:
Schools are major social, economic and political institutions, and schooling is a process affecting the transformation of Chinese society, especially in the process of youth transition to work, employability and labour mobility. Yet this area remains poorly understood and articulated. This study endeavours to generate new knowledge in this field. The research is a case study with an evaluative perspective on coming to understand today’s Chinese schooling. Given the pivotal role of social milieu and research context in this project, a personalised constructivism-interpretivism methodology is deployed, because it is socially interactive and provides the opportunity for empirical methodological review as part of the process. The study follows an emergent design as it offers not just a contextual relevance but also richness and sensitivity to process what is virtually excluded in methodologies stressing control and experimentation or use of formal instrumentation (Guba & Lincoln, 1982). The study has two goals. The first, under the umbrella concept of ‘hidden curriculum’, is to focus on characteristics of contemporary Chinese schooling culture. Given that China is a country that is culturally and politically different from Western liberal democracies where fruitful research has been conducted in exploring the sociological functions of education, this contextual idiosyncrasy gives rise to the second goal: to gain a perspective on possible school research cultures through critically reviewing Chinese engagement with sociological and educational research methodology. The first goal will be accomplished by looking at schooling from a “relational” perspective (Apple, 2012): through relating what happens out of school to that which happens inside school, the research aims to see how schooling answers the call from societal changes initiated by the recent political and economic reforms in China. Specifically, the case study examines the origin of Chinese social and schooling inequality, the function of ideology of meritocracy in the process of China’s recent societal stratification and the reform-reality disconnection in Chinese schools and people’s resultant resignation. Secondly, as a methodological study, this research explores the following four aspects: how the Self’s ontological and epistemological stance determines the power relationship involved in the research process; the political tension involved in social science; the situational and personal principles regarding ethics in indigenous social inquiry; and the generalisation and validity of a singular case such as this research.