Abstract:

In the process of rapid urbanization, there is a profound interactive relationship between the rise and fall of rural education and the development of urbanization. Based on field research in 7 provinces, 7 counties, and 8 townships in China, this study reveals multiple challenges facing high-quality development of rural education in the process of urbanization, and explores practical pathways for the high-quality development of rural education based on identifying opportunities for high-quality development in the later phase of urbanization. Research has found that high-quality development of rural education faces three major challenges: the structural constraints of binary fixed impressions and imbalanced status of urban and rural schools, the disorientation of stakeholders due to ambiguous role cognition and misaligned action logic, and the functional alienation of knowledge inheritance obstruction and educational value deviation. But the second half of urbanization also contains three major opportunities: the logical transformation of rural education development, the policy opportunities generated by urban-rural factors, and the activation of rural education development momentum through the rural revitalization strategy. In the future, high-quality development of rural education can be achieved through pathways such as optimizing resource allocation with counties as the carrier, rebuilding the endogenous dynamism of rural education via “empowerment and collaboration”, and reshaping the unique value of rural education through a “local-oriented” approach.

Key words: urbanization, high quality development of rural education, new urbanization, qualitative analysis