Recently, I am involved in a non-governmental organization project called Project Nous. It is a program initiated by a few Chinese international students to the U.S. and Europe, promoting the idea of liberal arts education, which is insufficient within China’s state education system, by organizing summer camps in Chinese cities, where seminars of no more than 15 students take place on subjects and topics like literature, theatre, and the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy. I am a seminar leader volunteering in this program at this moment, leading a seminar course of “Introduction to Contemporary International Relations”. Unlike most other programs that proclaim themselves propeller of “elite education” and charge their students a lot, we provide our entire program free of charge to everyone.
However, as we discovered that students still need to pay for their transportation, accommodation, electronic devices, etc., the question remains: is education a commodity, or are we making it a commodity? Is it true that we are in the system that automatically and unconsciously screens students into receiving different kinds of education based on their socioeconomic status?
Pierre Bourdieu introduces three forms of capitals – financial, social, and cultural capitals – that are exchanged with one another in human life. If we assume that the type of education we wish to provide in Project Nous, namely reading-based seminars, critical thinking, and liberal arts, as a cultural capital, what forms of capitals are exchanged for students to acquire this cultural capital?
Financial capitals are exchanged. Though we do not charge any tuition, the costs exist in every other aspect. Students from other parts of the city or other parts of the country need to cover their own transportation costs throughout the 10 days, and some students have to book hotel rooms or apartments near our venue so that they don’t need to spend 2 hours commuting. Students from lower socioeconomic status families, which are usually extremely far from the downtown area, are less likely to cover these expenses themselves. In addition, our venues and the transportation, accommodation, and meals for all seminar leaders (including me) are either sponsored or donated by other private sector partners (often times with business promotions or advertisements in return) or covered by ourselves.
Social capitals are exchanged as well. Our promotion information is released on a limited number of platforms, predominantly via our private sector and public sector partners on their social media. The targeted audience is broad and diverse enough in a business perspective, including students from various educational and family background; but in a perspective of education, the spectrum of the targeted audience is extremely narrow. Those students who have prior connections to these platforms (e.g. a well-known philosophy club, a high-quality private tutoring agency, a upper-class lifestyle magazine-like social media account) or connections to the seminar leaders (most of whom are top-3 university students in China or ivy league students in the U.S.) have a much higher chance to see these promotion information and have sufficient resources to fill an application. On the contrary, those students at a village high school may never expose to these platforms or connect with these people, thus probably never getting a chance to learn about our program at all.
In our market economy, external values are often attached by the upper class to certain commodities to fortify a societal hierarchy, such as the idea of luxury goods or different kinds of coffees. Education is developing into a commodity like that with external, socially constructed values, such as the “determinants of future success”, especially in China. People tend to regard education as a form of investment, expecting their investments of financial and social capitals in the sphere of education will generate more financial and social capitals to them in return. In this political economy perspective, education is reinforcing the mechanism of capitalism and social division in Chinese society.
Nevertheless, looking at this matter from a higher viewpoint, I spot the uniqueness of the environment, space, and place of this problem about education. After China’s reform and opening up – the transformation from a socialist planned economy to a modernized, relatively free, state capitalist market economy since 1978 – the importance of financial capitals is prioritized above social and cultural capitals, because of the great stimulus of the market economy. Education has been displayed as a tool even a means of production, thus there is little reinvestment into education once financial and social capitals are generated by education. This aggravates the scarcity and disproportion of education resources and opportunities in China’s socially and economically divided society, making educational injustice coinciding with the broader social injustice. Within this environment, education has to be further commodified and selective in order to retain itself as an effective mechanism to keep capitals exchanging.
Of course, I wish that education could be a type of social welfare that are institutionally unselective and accessible to everyone, but it’s almost impossible to do so, and Project Nous is probably one of the educations closest to social welfare. We may not be able to change the entire social structure instantaneously, but if we make more people believe in what we are doing and in what we believe, we are one step closer to our vision.