An Ethnography of Schooling Among Rural Migrants in Shanghai: Childhood as a Full-Fledged Social Line

An Ethnography of Schooling Among Rural Migrants in Shanghai: Childhood as a Full-Fledged Social Line. Camille SALGUES The schooling of rural migrant children in China has been the object of much attention, in the context of a large scale rural-urban migration and severe limitation in the access to public urban schools for newcomers. Drawing from an ethnographical study of children in a poor district at the margins of Shanghai, the article first presents a private school for migrants taking place in this institutional gap, then goes on to describe the place school takes within the family and the home through three case studies. Schooling is a social fact, in a genuine Durkheimian sense, the consequences of which are felt in all the spheres of the children's life. Such a description, in turn, is part of a larger attempt to show childhood and its institutions as a full-fledged line in the social differentiation of the individuals.