Educational Issues Around the World: Democracy, Morality, and Gender Inequality as Experienced in Norway, China, and Pakistan

Since the 1950s, China has institutionalized a system of student government across all school levels, in which a group of students is selected as class cadres to assist teachers in classroom management. Drawing on my ongoing ethnographic study in two high schools in Southwest China, this presentation provides a preliminary analysis of the competing moralities navigated by class cadres in relation to teachers and fellow students, based primarily on a specific incident of conflict between class cadres and their fellow classmates. Following the framework of competing moralities, my analysis serves as an illustration for bridging education and moral anthropology.

I present dialogic analysis of the students' general assembly meeting held in the first democratic high school in Norway that was important for the very existence of the school. It became an exploration of the meaning of education itself for different and widely diverse students. It was about their understanding of freedom, responsibility and meaning of education, their relationships and purposes in life. Through a dialogic analysis, I focus on abstracting the most contentious hot topics and dialogically deconstructing students’ diverse positions about their freedoms and responsibilities in their day-to-day practice and the meaning of their education.