SOCIAL CLASS AND PARENT INVOLVEMENT WITH CHILDREN'S EDUCATION: A STUDY OF EDUCATIONAL INEQUALITY IN CHIANG MAI PROVINCE
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Abstract
This article is an empirical study of the ways that parents’ social class impacts their children education.
The aim is to explore how these parents with different class background mobilize their resources to help their children through the education system. It draws on a survey of 50 respondents from three schools: one public school and two private schools in Chiang Mai. The study shows that although most of parents are interested, informed and concerned regarding their children education, their different class backgrounds significantly affect their involvement with children’s education. Middle class families tend to bring up and care for their children's learning in a way called in this study as ‘intensive cultivation’ while lower class and lower middle class families tend to look after and take care of their children’s learning with another method called ‘limited cultivation.’ These differences in patterns and styles of educational involvement help us see and understand the mechanism that social class use to make differences in their children’s opportunities and advantages in school. With education being central to processes of social reproduction, the paper suggests that specific patterns of social class in education may explain this differences in parent involvement with their children’s education and help to reproduce and sustain educational inequality in Chiang Mai.
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