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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
In chapter 2, I described some movements in and through Angang, leaving aside one of the most obvious and important: that of children going back and forth between their homes and the schools. Within the xiang there are three ‘national elementary schools’ (guomin xiaoxue), and one ‘national middle school’ (guomin zhongxue). Students obviously leave home to go to these buildings, and in many cases they must leave their villages to do so, coming back in the evenings. Once they have graduated from middle school, if they are to continue in education, they leave Angang altogether, only to periodically return. This moving back and forth, as I have suggested, also entails a shifting in and out of different ways of learning. In this chapter I want to discuss several of these ways: reading texts, watching television, becoming acquainted with certain role-models from popular culture, becoming consumers, imitating the pattern of teachers, and being bribed and punished by them. This may seem a strange way of describing what happens in schooling, but my argument is that children see the pattern of teachers, and interpret the proper way of the school, against the background of a much broader set of representations.
Studying and being a person are inseparable
The following text (read in the fifth year of elementary school) conveys the tone of much school-based rhetoric. Interestingly, it also asserts the value of practical non-school learning. The text is entitled ‘Studying and being a person’, Qiuxue yu zuoren. A more accurate, if clumsy, translation would be ‘Seeking learning and conducting oneself as a person’. Qiuxue can simply mean to attend school, or to study.
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