Higher Education Choice in China by Xiaoming Sheng

Author:Xiaoming Sheng [Sheng, Xiaoming]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Education, Parent Participation, Higher
ISBN: 9781317803942
Google: KxBgAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-04-16T05:56:24+00:00

The ways in which middle-class mothers make family cultural capital work

Developing reading habits

In relation to the influence of the familial cultural environment, a significant majority of middle-class parents claimed that developing their children’s reading habits was vital for their children’s educational progress. In particular, those parents who were intellectuals were keen to invest time and energy in training their children’s reading habits. These parents found that children’s higher educational attainment was closely associated with their reading habits. Furthermore, as shown by the results of the questionnaire used in this study, reading habits could be seen as the most important indicator of familial cultural activities in this study. The quotation below provides an insight into the ways in which the middle-class mothers develop their children’s reading habits.

I devote myself to educating my son in good reading habits … good reading is a foundation for a child to learn how to study … According to my own years of study, I have learned that if a child has developed appropriate reading habits, it is possible for him to learn everything he wants.

(Yan Hong, middle-class mother, associate professor at a university)

In line with Bourdieu (1984:120–2), the better-educated mothers, like Yan Hong, who had benefited a great deal from reading books in the course of their own educational history were eager to invest heavily in training their children’s reading habits in order to ensure that their children would acquire the same benefits that they themselves had done. Similarly, Jia Yufen said:

His interest in reading always inspired him to pursue more knowledge and skills which interested him … He likes reading books or journals about computer science … When he was ten years old he asked me to buy him a personal computer. Under my direction, he then taught himself to develop a computer program … Now he is an expert in computer science within his school.

(Jia Yufen, middle-class mother, professor at a university)

Jia Yufen expressed the view that her son’s academic progress was attributable to a long-established reading habit. In her view, reading books was a useful means of improving her son’s academic results. Twenty-two other middle-class mothers provided similar descriptions.

When she started to know something about the outside world, she began to like reading … both my husband and I are very happy and proud of this. And we think that her reading habits must be inherited from her grandparents and ourselves … when she was four years old, she liked me to tell her stories … every night, telling her one or two stories was the regular programme in our family … when my job was very busy, I started to buy a large amount of books with tapes for her and she listened to the tapes herself … in her elementary school I was too busy with my daily work to give her direct guidance for her study. And my parents gave a hand in assisting her study … what I can do is just to buy the books for her

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