With the constantly develop of economy and popularized compulsory education, most families can afford to give their children basic education. Also knowing the importance of education, even though financial condition is not so good in some rural area, parents still insist on ask their kids to go to elementary school. Everyone may have some regrets or uncompleted dreams; sometimes they may want their offspring can carry them on, so education becomes the first step in order to accomplish their dreams. To some degree, parents’ dreams also become a kind of cultural capital

In May this year, I went to rural area of China to be a volunteer teacher with my high school friends. We were in charge of teaching those kids English, music, painting, and P.E. class. The most impressive thing was their desire of getting more knowledge of outside world. When we were talking about the universe, history, and foreign countries, all of them were all ears and concentrate on our topic.

Later we got a chance to go to one of our students’ house. His mother was very hospitable and among the communication with his mother, we got to know that the boy’s father is a blue-collar class worker lives in a near city. Father has to shoulder the whole family’s expense while mother’s job is to take care of their child. Despite the heavy burden, they want their kids can get good education. Mother asked us about her son’s performance and requested us to help her son. In that village, majority of those kids are left-behind children, their parents in order to bear the burden of family, have to left their home to work. All parents want is that their kids can have basic education, carry on their dreams, do not have to manual work for living like them. And this does work as a sort of cultural capital push their kids to study.

But sometimes this kind of cultural capital can have opposite effect. There can be a situation like parents are knowledgeable or wealthy, they can provide their child good condition for studying, they can teach their kid, even have planned the way they want their child to follow always related to their own dreams. But too much pressure and different interest can cause kids to escape from bound of parents, some even go to extreme. This kind of phenomenon happened much more frequently in recent years.

As a conclusion, cultural capital is something we can’t choose either can’t avoid in our life, especially parents’ unaccomplished dreams. Usually, it can be utilized. However sometimes we can’t accept imposed idea, instead of giving up, we should let parents know what we are thinking about and get their help to purchase that.

 by Chen Siyuan