繞開、修復與「移動學習」： 深圳青年農民工「當老闆」與「見世面」的學習民族誌研究.

In Paul Willis’s “Learning to Labour”, the lads articulate ‘anti-school culture’ as their reaction after penetrating/seeing through the schooling mechanism. This paper will demonstrate some other reactions to seeing through the school system, through the case of migrant workers in Shenzhen China. These reactions are: bypass, repair, and “mobile learning”. By analyzing the learning strategies displayed by a group of young migrant workers in an electronics factory, who left school out of choice but were keen to learn, this paper argues that “mobile learning” allows social actors to imagine and realize new possibilities without challenging the existing structure. Migrant workers use this method to bypass and repair the school system which is falling apart. This paper points out that migrant workers who drop out from school are not “bad students.” This label is not helpful for understanding their situation or for solving their problems. Their problems cannot be solved by exhausting various resources to help them become “good students.” These young migrant workers are not backward, unteachable, unmotivated, or unwilling to learn. Rather, they saw through the middleclass nature of schooling and its urban bias, and realized it cannot possibly help them improve their livelihoods. They become wage labourers in factories in Shenzhen as the result of finding alternatives. Migrant workers who engage in “mobile learning” move to different places and social contexts. On the one hand, through “legitimate peripheral participation,” they gain knowledge and skills in that social context, and they collate and assemble such learning resources for their own use. On the other hand, they mobilize cultural taste, social experiences, and symbols between urban and rural settings, and thus create social, cultural, and symbolic capital which enables them to transform their subjectivities in response to the failure of the schooling system. However, “mobile learning” has its limitations. All the resources, opportunities, and every transition of this learning process is not institutionalized. “Mobile learning” relies largely on waiting, coincidences, the appreciation of supervisors and workers’ own extra labor (such as showing loyalty, hard work, diligence, etc.). In short, the path of migrant workers’ “mobile learning” is thin and easily ruptured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]