This book analyses modernity and tradition in China today and how they
combine in striking ways in the Chinese school. Paul Willis - the
leading ethnographer and author of Learning to Labour - shows how
China has undergone an internal migration not only of masses of workers
but also of a mental and ideological kind to new cultural landscapes of
meaning, which include worship of the glorified city, devotion to
consumerism, and fixation upon the smartphone and the internet.
Massive educational expansion has been a precondition for explosive
economic growth and technical development, but at the same time the
school provides a cultural stage for personal and collective experience.
In its closed walls and the inescapability of its 'scores', an
astonishing drama plays out between the new and the old, with a tapestry
of intricate human meanings woven of small tragedies and triumphs,
secret promises and felt betrayals, helping to produce not only exam
results but cultural orientations and occupational destinies.
By exploring the cultural dimension of everyday experience as it is
lived out in the school, this book sheds new light on the enormous
transformations that have swept through China and created the kind of
society that it is today: a society that is obsessed with the future and
at the same time structured by and in continuous dialogue with its past.
