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Unequal educational opportunity
As we all know, younger generation is the core force of national GDP growth and social prosperity,
and poverty will be greatly eradicated under their leadership. However, as a matter of fact, part of
younger generation is suffering from unequal education opportunity and social discrimination.
Although China has greatly popularized basic education among the public, which has quadrupled the
number of University graduates, but it has also created a situation of pushing the poor aside,
bureaucratic obstruction and income thresholds are dragging down the eager to get out of poverty
of the lower classes. One of the main causes of this problem is the uneven distribution of educational
resources between urban and rural areas. There are 60 million "left-behind" children in the
countryside, who were brought up by grandparents and their parents went to work on remote cities.
While many of their peers in the city are studying on top-class campuses and receiving the guidance
of high-level teachers, rural children are still huddled in dilapidated classrooms and struggling to learn
difficult subjects such as physical and chemistry without qualified teachers. This system only allows
rural children to go to school but does not care about whether they can learn stuff, so how can we
expect the poverty to eradicate when the younger generation do not make any progress?
But in cities, this unequal education still exists. Other children follow their parents to cities and become
children of migrant workers, but their chances of getting a good education are also limited. Many
governmental restrictions prevent them from integrating into local society. The household registration
system binds their right to public social services to their birthplace and keeps them out of the city's
public schools. Many children of this group can only choose private schools with poor education
quality and higher fees. Recent household registration reform is mostly aimed at some small cities,
which is a drop in the ocean for bridging the gap between urban and rural education opportunities.
In a metropolis like Beijing, some new policies seem to aggravate such discrimination. Many migrant
workers have no choice but to send their children back to their homes in the countryside.
Furthermore, China requires the vast majority of students to take the college entrance examination in
their hometown, while top universities allocate more places to first-tier cities such as Beijing and
Shanghai. A study found that a local student in Beijing was 41 times more likely to enter Peking
University than a student from a relatively poor province (Education in China).
If this situation continues, it may seem to the outside world that China is becoming more and more
powerful and having more high-tech talents. But for the residents, inequality still exists, and the gap
between the rich and the poor is still widening, which just hinders the speed of poverty eradication in
China, and even deepens poverty to some extent.
In economics, there is a saying called the cycle of poverty, which is the "set of factors or events by
which poverty, once started, is likely to continue unless there is outside intervention"(Cycle of poverty).
More specifically, Impoverished individuals do not have access to economic and social resources due
to their poverty, this lack may increase their poverty, and could mean that the poor remain poor
throughout their lives, meanwhile, their next generation are also suffer from poor situation due to the
poverty of the previous generation, with the time flows by, they are accustomed to the physical
environment of poverty and carry out their own ideas with poor thinking, and ultimately, this becomes
the cycle of poverty which cannot easily be changed. Therefore, the unequal education not only
affects one generation, in a manner of speaking it may bring about an unchangeable cycle of poverty
to a family or even a region from generation to generation and cause the deep-rooted poverty
mentality of one nation.
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China has declared that it will achieve complete
poverty alleviation by 2020. To achieve this goal, what Chinese need is not only the strong support of
government policies and the improvement of people's livelihood, but also the conditions for Chinese
young people to fully explore their potential. Only when a student from a relatively poor province and
one from metropolis can all have the opportunities to be enrolled by Peking University, external praise
for China's education as a social equity equalizer is worthy of its name, and education will no longer
be a stumbling block on the way out of poverty.
Work cited
Cycle of poverty. (n.d.). Wikipedia, Retrieved November 27,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty
Education in China. (n.d.) Zhihu, Retrieved November 27,
https://www.zhihu.com/question/21572307
2018,
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2018,
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RESEARCH PROJECT ASSIGNMENT
ENG1101
Statement of the assignment
Researching an Issue to Create a Call to Action
This research assignment involves idea generation (freewriting), focused research, synthesis of collected
data and generated text, and presentation of findings in the form of a short-length research paper.
Elements of this assignment (we will work through them in class)
Statement of the issue at hand (1 page) which expresses your understanding of the context in
which this issue is situated
Dialogue (two 1-page position statements, each of which reflects your findings on two conflicting
sides of your researched topic)
Persuasive essay, or peroration, drawn from research (1-2 pages; this will most likely become the
draft of
your
"call to action" which proposes a solution)
Works Cited page
Final Draft of paper which incorporates your argument and the major positions at stake within this
topic (1000 word essay, 4-6 pages, typed, double spaced, 12 point standard font, MLA citation
style), due no later than 11:59 p.m. on Friday, December 7, 2018.
Metaletter
Research Topics
Your assignment for this research essay is to analyze a current social issue and provide a
recommendation for action. The social issues you will use as a starting point are poverty and hunger. You
must focus your research on one county in Alabama. These topics are quite broad; for this essay project
you will choose a topic and narrow it sufficiently to create a compelling, researchable, and arguable
thesis.
For each of these topics, literally millions of pages have already been written. What I want from you is
an exploration of the topic that gets several layers beneath the surface. What is the biggest debate in
your topic area? Explore it in your dialogue. Then decide for yourself what matters, what people need to
know, and what needs to happen. You might argue, for example, for systematic healthcare for children in
America; you might argue for (or against) tying high-stakes testing to school funding; you might argue that
leveling the standards in schools hurts more students than it helps, or that shifts need to happen beyond
what NCLB proposes. Whatever it is, drill down, get the meaty information, and see what seems to matter
within the area you choose (poverty or hunger) in the Alabama county you choose.
Your sources for this paper must be very fresh. You can use only two sources (at most) that are more than
24 months old. For the rest of your research, you can quote ONLY from sources no more than 24 months
old. If you cannot verify the age of your source (it's an undated blog rather than a dated article, for
instance), you cannot use it unless it is an "extra" source (not one of the 2). You'll need at least 4 sources
for this essay.
Please note: Several topics are off limits for this project:
Gun control
Abortion
the Death Penalty
anything to do with Welfare.
That leaves open many, many other topics within the poverty/hunger areas, and I look forward to seeing
what you might choose to pursue!