Social culture; Economic resources; Occupation; Social stratification; vocational education
Social stratification refers to a social state in which different social groups occupy different positions because of their different wealth and power. At present, the polarization between the rich and the poor in China's social stratum structure is more obvious, the concentration of wealth is higher, and the polarization situation is grim. The boundaries between classes are gradually formed, and the lifestyle and cultural model with class characteristics are gradually formed. With the widening gap between social classes in China, the economic resources, information resources and cultural resources possessed and enjoyed by all classes are becoming more and more unequal. This difference is also reflected in the choice of education types, which leads to the gathering of a large number of lower-class groups in vocational education.
First, the performance of vocational education in promoting social class mobility is not obvious.
Education has the function of promoting social stratification and social mobility, which shows that individuals are linked to their career and socio-economic status as adults by receiving different levels and types of education. Some scholars have found that "the higher the education level, the higher the professional status and the higher the income ... the income of high school graduates may be about 5 1% higher than that of those with the same background but who have not finished high school." College graduates may earn 76% more than those with the same background but no college graduates, and' key' university graduates earn 28% more than' non-key' university graduates. " Education has become a symbol of status and social class, and it is also an effective means to promote social equity. The knowledge, skills, attitudes and values acquired in education, the level of education and the ability formed will all affect a person's path to enter society in the future and the opportunity to move between social classes. Therefore, the quickest, most effective and safest way for the lower class to get rid of poverty and flow to the class with rich economic income and high social status is to receive education. Get the qualifications and qualities needed for decent work through education, so as to obtain the conditions for entering a higher social class.
However, this is not obvious in vocational education. On the one hand, in theory, vocational education should be on an equal footing with general education, but in reality, it is inhabited by the lower classes or vulnerable groups. As some researchers pointedly pointed out, the opportunities for vocational education seem to fall more on children living in remote areas and poor families. Although this view is a bit extreme, it points out the reality that the educated group is weak in vocational education. Generally speaking, the lower social groups are not well educated and lack the awareness of receiving education. Coupled with the relative lack of economic and social resources, their children can not receive long-term education subjectively and objectively. Therefore, many children from the lower classes or disadvantaged groups flock to vocational education with shorter academic system and faster income. This is an important way for their next generation to get rid of their parents' current social class and flow to the upper class, and the cost is low. These groups, who graduated from short-term vocational schools and received insufficient cultural education, have obviously lower ability to interpret complex information and functional symbols in the new environment. When new occupations with high technology usage appear in economic development, people with high education can change careers in time and enter new occupations with high income, while graduates from vocational colleges have no chance and are forced to become occupational vulnerable groups. On the other hand, vocational colleges focus too much on children from the lower classes, which virtually reproduces the original social class and fails to play the social role of education in promoting social equity and narrowing class differentiation. Children of the lower class enter vocational colleges, and most of them are engaged in occupations considered as the lower class after graduation. They just move up and down relative to their parents' class. However, due to the shrinking and decreasing social class of their parents, they are still at the bottom of social stratification, and the social class has hardly moved upward. In this way, vocational education has become a tool to legalize the unequal distribution of social resources, and social stratification has also become an important factor affecting the development of vocational education. The limitation of vocational education in changing people's social stratum structure makes the current vocational education in China not develop as expected, but stagnate or shrink.
Second, social stratification hinders the development of vocational education.
The division of social strata can be based on occupational classification, and the theoretical framework can be constructed with the occupation of organizational resources, economic resources and cultural resources as the standards. Based on this, we choose cultural resources, economic resources and occupations to examine the influence of social stratification on vocational education.
(A) Cultural barriers between different classes have become the social root of people's contempt for vocational education.
Cultural barriers mean that groups with different cultural identities and status have different cultural capital, cultural tastes, cultural consumption and different lifestyles and values. In this homogeneous cultural group, people gradually form a common consciousness of class culture protection and exclusion through exchanges and actions-cultural barriers-to prevent people from other classes from entering this class and make the interests of people in this class inviolable.
Obviously, cultural barriers hinder social mobility, and the class culture it embodies will lead to the stratification of education for future generations. Upper-class families in society are generally highly educated and have superior cultural capital. As a genetic language and cultural ability, this cultural capital has a potential impact on the academic performance of future generations. Unlike the economy, it is not susceptible to external interference and fluctuates greatly, so intergenerational transmission is stronger. This intergenerational transmission of cultural resources is realized through the education system. The elite culture passed on from the previous generation to the next generation, and this elite cultural heritage can be transformed into children's talents or personal academic achievements, so that their children may have more opportunities to enter school than those families with few cultural resources. Therefore, social and cultural capital will affect the starting point, process and result of education, thus affecting the educational achievements of their children. Family background not only affects children's study through simple economic income, but also the inheritance of cultural capital is an important part of class reproduction. "After excluding the influence of economic location and social background, students from those families with higher education level not only have higher academic success rate, but also show different types of cultural consumption and cultural expression from students from other families in almost all fields." Nevertheless, education will still transcend cultural barriers and promote the mobility of social classes, especially in the context of popular education, which is more conducive to the social mobility of social classes. However, this phenomenon will threaten the interests of the upper class of society. Without changing the trend of education to promote social democratization, they will use all kinds of social resources and strength to strengthen the control of the labor market, and regard senior talents and high-paying positions as scarce resources matching high academic qualifications, which cannot be provided by current vocational education. In this way, class barriers artificially put vocational education at the lower level of society and "set" it as the inevitable choice of the lower level.
The influence of social culture on vocational education is also manifested in the bondage of traditional culture to vocational education. In our country, the concepts of "emphasizing learning over skills" and "diligent people govern people, diligent people govern people" are deeply rooted, which leads to the lack of the concept of training workers in educational value orientation and regards vocational education as "strange skills and cunning" Reflected in reality, vocational education has become a helpless choice that people have to make when they cannot continue to receive general education. As Mr. Yang, former director of the Vocational Education Department of the State Education Commission, said, although it has been made clear from the legal and general theoretical point of view that "vocational education is an important part of national education", in many people's subconscious, vocational education is still not as good as general education. It is also influenced by this traditional culture that general education always takes precedence over vocational education in enrollment policy; In the educational development plans and annual plans of local governments in many areas, the first priority is to ensure and meet the needs of general education, while vocational education is only a buffer to adjust the surplus and shortage of students in general education, and the status quo that vocational education admission batches are placed at the end of enrollment has not changed; Undoubtedly, the allocation of educational funds and other educational resources is also biased towards general education. The discriminatory policy within the education system stems from "giving priority to general education and neglecting vocational education", which makes the society's attitude towards talents more narrow. "Talents" are only students of ordinary higher education, especially those of famous schools and key universities, and have nothing to do with students of vocational colleges, thus making vocational education in an embarrassing position of only "supplementing".
Features:
1, for life. Social education is lifelong for anyone, and no one lives and studies by will.
2. Broad. Social education involves all aspects and corners of social life; Where there are people, social education will go where there are people, which is impossible for any education to have and implement. But it also has the greatest impact on special education.
3. Hierarchy. According to people's age, there are infants; Primary school; Middle school; Universities and adults. In terms of human status and level, there is a central level; Provincial and ministerial level; Municipal level; County level.
4. Diversity. The diversity of social education is the clearest and most obvious feature of social education, which is obviously ignored. This is the sorrow of social education. The biggest sorrow is the inconsistency of social moral quality caused by different jobs, responsibilities and tasks brought by different industries, positions, party, government and military associations.