Minding the gap: Revisiting the world institutionalization of mass education from a case study in Guizhou Province, China

The rise of world culture is an outcome of globalization. With globalization there have been increasing similarities between and among the societies of the world. This article examines the variety of social spaces where the social agent is educated from a case study in Fangxiang Village of Quizhou Province, China. It is apparent that the communities’ support is vital in mass education. However, the educational contexts and experiences of the people in the “locality” have always been neglected and tend to remain invisible in the macro development discourses. From the real life accounts gathered from Fangxiang Village, we find that the hidden ways of knowing implicate an imbalance power relation. It concerns the displacement of signifier “basic educational concepts” along different geopolitical scales. A variety of varieties of meanings is missing and poorly understood. The case shows that the particular and the universal are not separate. The interface of schooling, there emerges the hierarchical order of knowledge from different situation. The imbalance of the economic structure (relationship between the agricultural and the industrial sectors), the rural-urban structure and the land structure has a deep impact on the development of education in rural areas. Copyright © 2013 World Congress of Comparative Education Societies.