ABSTRACT
This chapter compares youth educational experiences in the three generations. What schooling has entailed for the young generation and their families suggests the rise of a prime example of the ‘schooled society’ in urban China. All the families interviewed showed a strong desire to maximize education for their child. Higher education has turned from merely being desirable but limited to a minority into an attainment seen as necessary for every worthy youth, resulting in the rise of the ‘higher education generation’, creating an extreme, and possibly internationally unique, pressure for academic excellence at the lower levels of schooling. This intense centrality of education contrasts sharply with their grandparents’ discourse of lack and irrelevance of schooling, and with their parents’ narratives about a childhood and youth when education was much less important. Besides globalization, this reflects China’s century-old and widespread reverence for education and its exemplary norm. It also has to do with the fierce competition for a ‘worthy’ livelihood in the post-Mao era without a state-provided safety net, higher education credentials inflation and the urban family’s strong desire to maximize human capital for the ‘priceless child’, also the ‘aspiring individual’ of the young generation.
