11/13/23 - School Dropouts Edition!
Just read a study on “invisible dropouts”.
The difference between invisible dropouts and visible dropouts, is whether the student is still registered at a school—that is, they’re on the roster as a student, they’re paying tuition, and otherwise, they don’t actually attend class or participate in learning, and are just waiting for graduation.
In a lot of western villages, due to culture, customs, and habits, it’s very typical for teenagers to invisibly drop out of school. The students leave class for all kinds of reasons, whether voluntarily or involuntarily drifting away from education, avoiding growing up, and become a risk for continuing poverty.
Invisible dropouts are split into voluntary cases and involuntary cases. Involuntary cases is when the school and teachers try to raise graduation rates by splitting students into different tiers of classes, pushing a majority of students into chaotic and sometimes violent classrooms and start exclusively teaching them how to get into tech school, making the students think there’s no point in trying anyways. Voluntary invisible dropouts are when students themselves choose to just “pass time” at school due to burn out with their studies, or frequently skip class.
An analysis of the reasons why students invisibly drop out at a certain school in a western village:
School L is situated at almost 3000 metres above sea level, with bumpy, windy mountain roads. Most of the people make their income by farming, with some families having additional income from stores, hotels, or restaurants. As a result, a portion of teenagers have a “family business” to inherit. But aside from that, these families don’t make a lot of money at all, they’re mostly hovering on the brink of poverty.
More importantly, L is situated deep in the mountains, with very inconvenient transportation and communication, and with a lot of ethnic minorities. People hang out in familiar traditional tribes, and are very influenced by traditional mindsets.
Willpower dropout from lack of of a goal.
“Willpower” refers to whether a student is goal-oriented and hardworking when studying. A willpower dropout refers to a student who has lost their goals, has no hope, and don’t have any dreams.
An introverted presentation of a Willpower dropout refers to a student who voluntarily comes to class and never skips, but zones out in class because they don’t have a goal they’re working towards. They’ll do other things during class that doesn’t affect anyone else’s studies, like daydream or doodle or play with post-it notes. This is a very introverted form of dropping out, which consists mostly of the student running away from themselves.
One student at School L never opens her book from the moment class starts to when the teachers leave. Her desk is totally empty, with not even a scrap of paper on it. She’s just constantly staring off and daydreaming, or drawing on her hand with a pen.
Another student has a desk covered in junk—pencil case, draft paper, books. But when the teacher’s lecturing, he’s just randomly doodling on his books, and then tearing off the doodle pages to throw away into his desk drawer.
An extroverted presentation of a Willpower dropout has a student aimlessly wandering through the classroom, chatting with their classmates, passing snacks back and forth, making noise, or playing games. Once this situation occurs, it’ll severely influence everyone else in class too.
The Chinese teacher is having the students read a passage out loud, but the student in the back row near the window began loudly chatting with his classmate while everyone else was reading for five minutes. In the middle of math class, not only is a student eating during class, but also kicking his chair loudly.
A quote from Teacher H, “Students are impossible to control these days! They’ll chat the whole way through class, never do their homework, get upset if you tell them off at all, and never listen. I figured if they really didn’t want to listen, they can do their own thing, so long as they’re not affecting anyone else. But I can’t help it. They have to make some kind of noise, and get other people to play with them.”
2. Capability dropout as a result of a lack of ability to keep up.
Capability refers to the student’s potential for development. A lack of capability shows itself when a student has a hard time keeping up with their school work. Although they’re sitting in the classroom, they’re not actually effectively studying, potentially due to an obvious learning disability.
Rural education is much more focused on teaching to the test and enforcing behavioural rules than urban schools. A unique culture is formed in these schools of “elite culture” and “competition culture”. Students with background and capability become “elite students”, and students who don’t follow the rules become what teachers refer to as “the dregs”, and they’re treated discriminatorily by the teachers.
As a result, after some bad experiences, these “dregs” become lethargic and listless, zoning out in class, never interacting with or listening to the teachers, refusing to take out their book or notebook in class, and not doing homework after class.
A lot of students start out listening to the lectures very seriously, but as soon as the teachers go into detail, they start getting anxious because they can’t understand. And in the end, they just close their book and stop listening.
3. Popularity Dropout as a result of not fitting in with the mainstream.
Popularity dropout refers to when a student realises that they have irreconcilable differences with the “mainstream” at school, and flee from the school, including frequently skipping class, showing up late, leaving early, taking sick days, and not listening to attempts to persuade them.
A quote from Teacher Z: “We’ve got five or six students or even more who are semipermanently missing from every class. The teachers have to beg them to come to school every time. I even caught a student in the middle of climbing over the fence to leave school. But he just won’t change no matter how much I lecture him. They never listen.”
A quote from Teacher L: “There’s a girl in my class. If she’d continued at school, she would’ve been in 9th grade. She had a kid in 8th grade, and after that, she never came back to class.”
The core to revitalising the rural economy means helping people with not just their materialistic needs, but their educational and motivational needs too. And motivational needs are the most important step of all. It solves the problem of the desire for revitalisation and motivation, and prevents frequent returns to poverty and passing poverty down to the next generation.
A lot of students don’t have a clear goal when they’re studying. Not only do parents fail to direct them towards a suitable goal, encouraging them to have ambitions, but the students themselves lack interest in having a goal at all. And in time, they’ll become sick and tired of studying, and become a pointless school-tending zombie.
A lot of students in School L isn’t much interested in their kids receiving an education and learning knowledge. They’re more worried about how their kid isn’t capable of running the family business yet, but is a pain in the ass to keep at home, and they can’t be tossed out onto society without encountering bad influences, so they see school as a daycare that’s fully responsible for educating the kids, taking care of them, and feeding them, etc. And when time comes, the parents will find some other way out for their kids. Due to their parents’ influence, the students obviously believe that school is just an institution that’s meant to feed them and keep them during the day, while they wait to come of age. They don’t have to worry about their future.
A lot of students obviously have a lack of confidence in their own capabilities. If they get low grades on a couple of tests, they’ll lose the motivation to keep trying. They’ll assume that the reason is because they’re simply low intelligence, put themselves down further by comparing themselves to other people, and believe they’re “stupid”. This self-doubt makes students lose the motivation to continue going to school.
A quote from Student CL: “I’ve got a bad memory. I can never remember anything. The teacher is always saying that I’m just not working hard enough, but that’s not the case at all. My family’s saying that if I can’t make it at school, I can just stop going, and start working sooner. I’m not really cut out for studying anyways.”
In a lot of rural schools, the mindset of teaching to the test and elimination of the unfit is still very popular. Students with a strong financial background gets more emotional support and acknowledgement from their teachers, school admin, and other students. Students from a weak financial background will suffer from several rounds of elimination of the weakest, and begin self-sabotaging their own studies, lose confidence in the capabilities, and eventually choose to “let it rot” and invisibly drop out.
Due to School L’s location in the closed off mountains, most parents haven’t received any education either. As a result, they lack experience, and don’t want to sink too much effort, time, and money in education when they’re not sure how useful it even is. And because of the limitations of their parents’ education, students themselves are often quite dismissive of the importance of school as a result of family influence. They don’t have a good foundation when they started receiving education, the school doesn’t have a plan for these children, and so they often get divided into the “pointless waste of time” category.
A quote from Teacher Z: “Most kids are free-range. A lot have parents who work out of state and are being raised by their grandparents. All grandparents want from kids is to stay healthy. They can’t really help out with studies even if they wanted to anyways. So a lot of students never form healthy studying habits. And with no one tutoring them after class, there’s no way they can keep up.”
A quote from Student Z: “Before, the school put on a culture and arts performance. All the kids on stages are the teacher’s kids. We were just the audience, clapping for them and cheering for them. The comparison just makes me feel like, man, I don’t know how to do anything. I don’t really stand out in school at all.”
Conflict of values: the clash between “traditional” and “mainstream”.
Traditional here refers to the “common sense” that’s passed down in L village generation after generation, whereas mainstream refers to modern urban civilisation.
“Marrying early and birthing early” isn’t just the product of traditional feudalistic values and a way to maintain clan law, it’s also the result of modern families and a lack of education.
On the one hand, choosing to marry young after considering your options rationally not only resupplies society with labour, but helps create GDP, and it can fulfil your dreams of continuing your family line.
On the other hand, as modern and rural vulture mix, teenagers are more and more proactive in dating, and early dating is more and more common as a phenomenon. It’s very subtle and stubborn, and difficult to detect or prevent.
Early dating and marriage is a result of lack of family and school intervention. When “going to school” conflicts with dating or marrying, students choose to invisibly dropout instead.
A quote from Teacher S: “More than 50% of our school is composed of ethnic minorities. They’ve got quite a lot of population. And minority families are very different from ours when it comes to marriage. A lot of people in these villages get married when they’re teenagers. A lot of students come to school for no other reason than to find a spouse.”
Our current education model is too profit-motivated. People’s logic for receiving education is, “Study hard —> make money —> support your family —> become an elite.”
On the one hand, a lot of families can achieve increased income from just working their fields hard, and successfully accomplish the latter three steps. So they feel it doesn’t really matter whether they perform the first step of studying hard.
On the other hand, a lot of the knowledge taught in the classroom isn’t necessarily applicable to life. When the things students learn can’t actually solve their problems in life, they’ll start being confused about the purpose of school.
Quote from Student M: “There’s a guy in our class whose family farmed turnips last year. They sold like crazy last year. It’s not just turnips either. There’s also yams. Everyone grows yams. Yams are super popular. My family grows yams and we sell them, and we make a lot of money too.”
Comments say, “I’m invisibly quitting my job.”
“I mean, this study is about dropouts, but as a salaryman, I definitely see myself reflected in this.”
“I’ve seen an interview on Southern Weekly around 2008, where they interviewed sex workers in coastal cities in the Southeast. And in the interview, she said that starting from middle school, aside from paying her tuition every semester, she never stepped foot in school. The interview said that everyone she knows did this.”
“I’m from a small town in a western province, and I feel this so hard. Growing up, of course everyone told me that I had to study hard, but I just felt so helpless. I don’t know how to go about “studying hard”, or what I’m studying hard for. And when my capabilities didn’t match my parent’s expectations, conflict would erupt, and I’d try to escape reality by turning to internet games.”