The education of migrant workers’ children in Chinese cities between stigmatization and social integration

Abstract

The hukou registration system in China affects educational and schooling experience of migrant workers’ children in Chinese cities, creating a big gap between migrant children’s level of integration and education and their urban peers’ one. Even though the Chinese central government has gradually reformed the hukou system over the last years and issued a number of policies to gradually allow migrant children into public schools in cities, the big inequalities in the access of education and opportunities lead to stigmatization and difficulties in integration for rural-to-urban migrant worker’s children. This study takes into account different researches that – through the analysis of the different government policies on the education of migrant children over the years and the use of concepts such as cultural capital, social capital - show how the condition of migrant children affect not just their educational experience but their overall social condition, their choices after school and more generally their personal development and social mobility. The study further focuses on the reality of education of migrant children in the city of Beijing, with a case-study on private education. This job articulates around the topic of the education system of Chinese “floating” children and the social and governmental matters related to it trying to analyze both the different government’s policies about the integration of migrant students and also the social consequences and current situation. The relevance of this matters can be found in the numbers: in contemporary China there are an estimated 288.36 million non-hukou migrant workers residing in urban areas and about 20 to 30 million migrant children.