A mother rides with her daughter on a country road in Chuancang Village, Xiushui County, Jiangxi Province. Photo: PROVIDED TO CSST

In the context of urbanization and the modernization of rural education, the marginalization of families in children’s education in rural areas has become a widespread phenomenon as families step down from childcare duties and formal education takes their place. Rural families continue to bear substantial educational responsibilities and invest significant resources in education. However, they increasingly feel marginalized, as early childhood education has become disconnected from their family values and practices.

The comprehensive social support inherent in traditional rural societies is the foundation of family-led education. Therefore, theories that focus solely on cultural capital or the acquisition of rural educational resources cannot fully and effectively explain the rural family’s role in education. Research on the marginalization of families in education should not be confined to specific research variables or schools of thought, it should be based on a perspective of practicality and totality.

Marginalization of families in education

The marginalization of families in education results from the breakdown of the highly networked social structure that connects individuals, families, and society. This breakdown weakens the formerly comprehensive social support system within villages, which previously supported family-led education. This process occurs simultaneously on three levels: the individual, the family, and society.

On the individual level, population mobility has isolated individuals from families and rural communities, disrupting the multifaceted educational structure built from close-knit interactions and mutual support. On the family level, competitive educational environments linked to urbanization and the rise of the middle class have increased the educational burdens allocated to parents, overshadowing the educational value of rural families and village communities. On the societal level, educational functions were once shared by society, but education has increasingly been concentrated in specialized school systems, which are isolated from the daily lives of rural communities and families.

This article focuses on these three levels—individual, family, and society—to explore the mechanisms behind the marginalization of families in education from different perspectives.

Since the reform and opening up, the rapid advancement of urbanization has led to significant changes in the production methods and lifestyle of rural residents. The separation of production from daily life has created a division of time and space, breaking the integrated family unit and weakening the publicity of villages, undermining the social foundation of family-led education. Migrant work has led to spatial and psychological distance between parents and children, leading to a lack of family involvement in caregiving, companionship, and supervision.

Although migrant children who enter the city avoid the fate of being separated from their parents, it is difficult for busy parents and distant village peers to provide effective life education. Other children who remain in their hometowns find that rural society itself has changed, increasingly becoming individualized and isolated in the process of urbanization and marketization. Villages have become spaces devoid of social connections, making it hard to implement family-led education and the socialization of children.

During this process, the multifaceted educational structure of rural society, in which education is supported by an interdependent social system consisting of individuals, families, and villages—featuring multiple subjects, settings, methods, extended timeframes, and strong cultural subjectivity—has been dismantled. Education has increasingly shifted towards an institutional, one-dimensional structure, and family-led education has lost its necessary social support.

Families and communities, which once played active roles in childrearing, have become passive participants in the school system. However, school education has a limited timeframe, space, and intensity, and cannot cover all aspects of students’ lives. Outside the school setting, families and communities are steadily marginalized and unable to effectively fill the gaps, leaving students’ values and worldviews to be shaped online or by the marketplace, resulting in many educational risks. As a result, after the breakdown of the multifaceted educational structure, students either immerse themselves in the linear structure of school education or wander in the “unregulated land” outside of school, family, and society.

Impact of urbanization

Urbanization is accompanied by a set of credential acquisition and professional selection mechanisms centered around intense educational competition. Rural families are drawn into this process, and rural parents, who are often in economically and socially disadvantaged positions, recognize the crucial role of educational qualifications in transforming the lives of their children. As a result, they adopt a utilitarian educational strategy: “Go to university—get a good job—live a good life.”

This intense educational competition further weakens the cultural subjectivity of rural families in the educational process, forcing their educational models to increasingly align with urban and middle-class standards. Scholars have noted that migrant worker families typically develop two types of parenting strategies due to their economic conditions and urbanization orientations: a laissez-faire model or a meticulously nurturing model. The latter is largely a mimicry of the detailed parenting practices of urban middle-class families, requiring parents to invest greater personal time and financial resources, thereby increasing the family’s economic burden.

On the surface, it seems that families bear heavy educational responsibilities and have a say in their children’s education. In reality, rural parents are often passive recipients of the educational content and methods, which have already been defined by urban mainstream discourse. Families are compelled to passively accept curricular activities and compete in expensive educational competitions, sometimes losing confidence in their own education when faced with their well-informed and knowledge-equipped children. Many parents have said that they feel “they can only contribute money and effort but not contribute any voice.” Despite being key participants in China’s urban development and modernization over recent decades, the instructive value of rural parents’ life practices remains obscured. The weakening of the rural family’s role in education has accelerated the gradual erosion of the functions of emotional cultivation, value guidance and normative acquisition in rural society, making rural families increasingly dependent on schools. This, in turn, accelerates the formation of a school-dominated, one-dimensional educational structure.

With the advancement of urbanization, rural society’s nurturing function has been greatly diluted. As educational reforms progress, education has become increasingly detached from rural society. This is evidenced through the content and methods schools teach which have completely moved away from the daily lives of rural families. Teachers and students have become spatially and relationally distant from rural families and society. Urban-centric school education places students in individualized, atomized learning environments, even further encroaching on family life and leading to a deeper disconnect between the younger generation and their parents.

In traditional societies, rural schools were embedded in local society and rural life practices. Schools were the “cultural high ground” of rural society, taking on the role to lead its modernization. Villages, as the birthplace of Chinese civilization, provided cultural nourishment for schools. Teachers lived in villages, interacted closely with villagers, and held prestigious social positions, with their values and educational methods aligning with the village’s moral teachings.

In this setting, school and family education resonated in harmony. The relationships among students were not only those of classmates but were also embedded via kinship, geographical, and other intimate connections. Any interaction is influenced by other aspects of the relationship, forming what Marcel Moss calls “totality.” This makes their interaction complex and influenced by everyday relationships beyond simple classroom dynamics. Teaching content and schedules at school were also integrated into the village’s daily life, with schools organizing student participation in productive labor, ceremonial rituals, and other rural activities. Thus, rural life education and school education were integrated and complemented each other effectively.

Today, many schools have physically moved away from villages. Of greater significance, the teaching environment, narrative environment, and spiritual environment of schools have gradually drifted away from village life. Teachers, now detached from rural society, often become representatives of urban educational views. The individualization and estrangement of rural society have eroded relationships among classmates. The importance of highly networked, multi-dimensional rural social relationships has declined, with single, flat classmate relationships becoming dominant. Classmates may become competitors, form homogeneous social circles, or simply become “strangers” they interact with daily.

Recentering families in education

Under the influence of the aforementioned three mechanisms, school education has increasingly overshadowed the family, affecting and even determining the family’s daily arrangements and relationships.

It is thus necessary to enhance the family unit’s subjective initiative and return education to the family domain, rather than having the family merely comply with school agendas. This has become a shared societal concern, which will inevitably bring the issue of “recentering families” in education into the academic and policy-making discussion. Recentering families in education does not require parents to invest more time or money. Instead, it involves restoring the subjectivity of the family, rediscovering the educational value within family life practices, and enabling the family to play its role in the education and socialization of children, thus making school-family collaboration genuinely effective.

The premise for recentering families in education is to clearly understand the mechanisms of family-led education and the marginalization of families in education and to prioritize an education based on an understanding of the totality of rural society. Social support in a structure with totality is the foundation of family-led education in traditional rural settings. Traditional rural areas were oriented towards familial ethics, centered on the family, and engaged individuals in life practices across multiple contexts, continuously adjusting their interactions with the external world, thereby establishing emotional, meaningful, and normative consistency and continuity between individuals, families, and society. The marginalization of families in education essentially means the loss of this deep social coherence due to factors such as population mobility, educational competition, and the detachment of schools, leading to a disconnection between individuals, families, and society.

Recentering families in education means rebuilding the connections between individuals, families, and society. In the context of rapid urbanization and modernization, replicating a static and closed rural society is no longer realistic. However, under the backdrop of urban-rural integration, favorable conditions such as population return, resource return, and the development of communication tools create new possibilities for rebuilding local networks with totality in specific life contexts.

In rural China, individuals, families and society can be embedded in each other to form a totality. As a result, society can support family-led education, and rural schools are integrated into the life practices of families and society. Reconstructing totality in specific life contexts involves finding possible practical contexts, methods, and matching meaning and values across urban and rural family life practices, allowing individuals, families, schools, and society to reconnect in specific settings, thereby addressing and mitigating the negative impacts of the marginalization of families in education on child socialization.

The reconstruction of totality must be grounded in life practices and should not be limited to educational practices. Therefore, recentering families in education must genuinely bridge the gap between the educational process and rural family life practices.

In short, we propose three practical pathways for recentering families in education. First, it is essential to encourage students to return to prioritizing family and social life. Second, we need to re-embed education within family and social life. Last, rebuilding the cultural subjectivity of rural families and rural society is essential for the success of this strategy.

Dong Leiming (professor) and Li Xincan are from the School of Sociology at Beijing Normal University.