利益分化、地位焦虑与教育竞争

Interest Differentiation,Status Anxiety and Educational Competition

与以往研究将教育竞争激烈化主要归咎于教育领域本身的做法不同的是,本研究强调教育行为的社会情境性和历史性,通过对社会情境四个理想类型的分析,提出了解释教育竞争的一般性命题:社会不平等程度越高(或人们感知的社会不平等程度越高),且通过教育实现社会流动的可能性越大(或人们感知的通过教育实现社会流动的可能性越大),则教育竞争越激烈,而学校教育的"符号功能"则有着进一步加剧这种竞争的可能性。根据这一命题,通过分析20世纪八九十年代以来中国社会情境的变化可以发现,社会经济利益分化在相对较短时间内的急剧凸显和持续拉大、客观存在和人们感知的通过教育实现流动的可能性等,构成了当前中国人教育行为的不可忽视的结构情境,这一结构情境加剧了人们的地位焦虑,塑造了教育竞争的形态。

Different from previous studies, which mainly attributed the fierce competition in education to the field of education itself, this study emphasizes the social contextuality and historical nature of educational behavior. Through the analysis of four ideal types of social contexts, it proposes a general proposition of competition as a way of explanation: the higher level the social inequality is(or the higher level of social inequality as perceived by the public), and the greater the possibility is to achieve social mobility through education(or the higher perception of doing so), the more intense the competition in education will become, and the “symbolic function” of school education may further intensify this competition. According to this proposition, by analyzing the changes in China’s social contexts since the 1980 s and 1990 s, we can find that the sharp prominence and continuous expansion of the differentiation of social and economic interests in a relatively short period of time, the objective existence and the possibility of people’s perception of social mobility through education, etc., have constituted a structural context that cannot be ignored in the current style of Chinese educational behavior. This structural context exacerbates people’s status anxiety, and shapes the form of educational competition.