The Research On Education Problems Of The Floating Population's Children Under The Dualistic Social Structure

The long-existing rural-urban dualistic structure widens the income gap between the urban and rural population. With the reform on economic structure and the weakening of dualistic structure, a large-scale of migration of rural surplus labor force into cities have occurred since the 1980s.Gradually, the tide of peasant labors is rising in scale. And there is more and more emigration of whole families. In addition, those people tend to live longer and longer in a new place. All the above contributes to the education problem of floating populations' children. Most of the peasant labors leave their children in their hometown for education. The quality of education is very poor in this dualistic education system. When parents get stable salary and housing in cities, they will take their children there to attend school. But, these children, as son and daughter of peasants in the city, still live as a kind of "Urban Edge People". They suffer discrimination from others; they don't have the right they should get; they also don't have a sense of belonging and recognition. With the absence of kinships and safety, no aid in life, no guide in study, no regulations in morality, imbalance of mental life, there are a serious problem of education inequality among the children of floating population, such as low entrance rate, poor quality and environment of teaching. How to settle this problem concerns the growing of those children and the realization of their personal value, as well as the sustainable development of our country's modernization and urbanization, even the building of a new socialistic country and a harmonious society. Thus, it is of great significance to treat them as a special group of young people in the society and study their problems during the early stage of socialization.This paper consists of five parts. From the perspective of rural-urban dualistic structure, it adopts methods of archive consulting, questionnaire and individual interview. The first part raises the question, sums current research achievements and introduces basic theories and its related concepts. The second part tells the background on the education problem of floating population's children. The existence of rural surplus labor in dualistic economy and the income gap between urban and rural population forces peasants leave their hometown to make a living in cities. The market reform and weakening of dualistic social structure leads to the formation of "peasant labor tide". The increase on the number of peasants into cities, especially whole-family emigration, causes this education problem. The third part describes their situation of no safety, no aid in life, no guide in study and imbalance of mental life. Then it analyzes specific problems in their education. The forth part explores the causes from three perspectives: poverty, inappropriate political system and differential in culture. Due to poverty, peasant labors are struggling for a living all days and have no time to care about their children's education. They can hardly keep balance between making money and taking care of their children. Education loses its inequality because of inappropriate management, the system of census register and dualistic education system. The differential between urban and rural population in knowledge capital isolates them as "Urban Edge People". They are not likely to become part of the urban cultural circle. All these worsen the education problem. The fifth part provides solutions accordingly by developing rural economy and breaking the dualistic education system.