A Wall Between Two Worlds

This semester, I took a sociology course “Changing Family Forms”. From all the things I learned in that course, I was impressed by one term “Nested Inequalities”, which means that the inequality of education can exist across boundaries of states, school districts, schools within a district, class within a school, and sometimes separation within a class (Hochschild, 2003). This term interested me the most because it is relevant to my personal experience.

I have a cousin who is two years younger than me. From kindergarten to middle school, we were in different schools and different areas of the city, but for high school, her school was next to my high school. There was only one wall between our schools, but our learning experiences were completely different. In China, most of the schools are public schools that provide the education needed for GaoKao (Chinese college entrance examination), but there are also some private schools that offer international curriculums but charge higher tuition. Among the public schools, there are also differentiated by reputation and quality. My high school was one of the private schools, and my cousin was in a public school which was not good. Despite curriculums, class size, facility and teachers were also different in our schools. My class only has 35 students, but her class has more than 60 students; my high school has a big playground and a small auditorium, which my cousin’s school doesn’t have. Moreover, teachers in our school all had backgrounds of studying abroad, and there were also several teachers from the U.S. and U.K. In my cousin’s school, all the teachers were very young and inexperienced.

The wall between our schools shows how serious the problem of education inequality is in China. Even for schools that are next to each other can be so different, it would be no need to compare schools in the city with schools in the rural area. I cannot say that the education I received is much better than the one my cousin received, but I know that I have more resources and opportunities than her. The main reason behind education inequality is the old topic of income inequality. Only the high-income family can afford the tuition for private schools or good public schools, and some poor families are even unable to afford any education for their children.

In the soon future, I’d like to see the “wall” between schools being destroyed, so that students can have equal opportunities to have a high-quality education.

Work Cited

Hochschild, Jennifer L. 2003. “Social Class in Public Schools.” Journal of Social Issues 59:821–840.