Education Policy Functioning In Rural Society

Rural Min-ban-teachers is a special professional group in the history of People's Republic of China. With dual identities as teachers and fanners , Min-ban-teachers made great contribution to the development of rural education with low income provided by government and the people. The thesis makes use of historical documentary and oral history, using the method of ethnography in anthropology to investigate the Min-ban-teachers' life history under the influence of policy reform and the interaction process between policy and individual strategy in M county of Northern Jiangsu province.Education policy guided the whole Min-ban-teachers process from the beginning to the end. Though formal teachers were in shortage, universal education was still pursued blindly. Thus, the number of Min-ban-teachers increased significantly, bringing in quality decline. To improve the quality of education, government began to strengthen management of Min-ban-teachers by complete checking, qualifications examine, professional title assessment after the Reforming-and-opening. The quality of rural Min-ban-teachers troop was improved a lot. In addition to turned them into public teachers, the formal management is put into effect at last in 1997. All these measures and policies as well as qualification acquiring methods reflected the more modernity in the Chinese modernization process. Besides, the reformation of macro political and economic system, family planning policy and household registration system influence rural Min-ban-teachers policy.The teachers themselves also used individual strategies contained in the rural social culture to interact with policies actively. The social network resources include "favoritism" and "relationship" while symbolic resources contain "face", and "composition" etc. They all make up the Min-ban-teachers' individual strategies resources. All these result from the action logic of special doctrine under the "differential mode of association" in Chinese social structure. The changes of rural society also made the action logic of political campaign and exchange principals of marketing economy become resources to the creation of individual strategies.In the interaction process between national policy and individual strategies, the officials in grassroots educational administrative departments both as local cummunity member and bureaucracy organization member took advantage of various resources distribution to set a basic education policy network on the ground of "emotion" , "ren-qin" and "local context". Emotion is the core of the policy network, which is different from the high rationality of western policy network. Education policy operates in such network causing its compulsory elimination and flexibility emerging to some extent, and the boundary of the policy adjust according to different circumstance. In detail, Min-ban-teachers tried to adapt to the need of national policy's reform and also utilize individual strategies to game with the government at the same time. In that case, they can guarantee the basic principals won't change completely under the policy pressure. This shows the tenacity of individual strategies based on the rural society cultural foundation.