Week one: explore my discipline and broaden my horizon about inequality and society
Hello, everyone, my name is Haiqing Fu and I am a new student to the inequality and society. I have some basic knowledge about the accounting, and I am interested in the data analysis. Through this classes, I wanna explore my horizon and learn some advanced skill to analyze some social phenomenon.
About the inequality, I think it’s a big concept. Although when I was a little girl I have heard about the inequality, I still think It is far from my life. With the time pass away, it is time for me to get into the society and work, I find out more and more about the inequality. It seems that men are more easily to get a good job than a women. In addition, women have a high risk to lose their job when they get pregnant… excepting in the working condition, there are still other kinds of inequality in our world. Why there are always existing inequality and it’s always hard to tackling inequality? I have think about this questions for years. At present, I think it is because our world grow in a traditional way, a small group of people hold majority of the resources. They have a kind of privilege and always want to keep it. They are the hinder to alleviate inequality. Anyway, the resources are limited and if they shared their holding interest with others it would do harm to their own life quality. However, to push the society move forward and grow in a healthy way, we must find out the way to release this kind of inequality in many ways.
I realize that in China few people can realize that they were treated in an inequality way. eg. in working condition. That is because public have little knowledge about the inequality. Although some of them have this basic knowledge, they don’t think they have the ability to protect their own legal right by themselves. I believe this situation not only happened in China, but also many countries around the world. We need the cooperation of different parties and stakeholder to work together. On the one hand, raising the public awareness what kind of inequality we are experience in our actual life. On the other hand, find an efficient way to deal with this problem. This course is very suitable for student to solve this kind of situation. We can learn how to analyze problem by integrating the discipline from other subjects. It would be more justice combining big data analysis.
Hopefully, I can learn how to use this kind of tools like python to analyze the data in a high efficient way and also learn how to integrate different discipline knowledge together and think about more stakeholders’s interest.
Welcome, Haiqing! And wow, I would have expected inequality to be part of the Chinese school curriculum given that it was an important catalyst for the formation of the Communist Party of China. It’s interesting that it’s not really discussed (although to be fair, they also didn’t really talk about it in the schools I went to in the US growing up either). I’ll be interested to learn what your thoughts are as we dive into the data together.
I guess inequality is discussed in some of the curriculums in China, but mainly in a quite theoretical way in secondary education. The Chinese compulsory education (until secondary schools) is still quite “test-oriented”, and therefore the discussions in the courses are not so centred around real-life issues. This is definitely an issue that needs more attention. The Chinese universities seem to have made some improvements on this aspect, and the general social awareness on inequality and especially gender inequality have improved rapidly in the past decade. I wouldn’t say that China have more inequality issues than other developed countries. The inequality issues just present in different means I guess.
Hello Hanyu: You and I both agree. Everywhere in the world, inequality is a problem. And in recent years, China has improved from some angles. I’ve seen various experts discuss the gender disparity in social media. What we all want to see is that kind of improvement. However, there is still a long way to go because it is hard to eradicate various forms of inequality.
Hi，Theresa. China has talked about some of the inequality in school. For example, Some of the educational inequality has been discussed in China. Similar to how poverty causes inequality, education inequality likewise tries to address this kind of issue. There are numerous inequality issues that need to be addressed worldwide. The necessity to take into account the interests of numerous stakeholders makes it difficult to address inequality in a straightforward manner. In order to abolish various kinds of inequality, we must acknowledge that there is still much work to be done.
Hi Haiqung, great blog post! This idea of those who are victims of inequality not being aware of inequalities or seeing them as ‘normal’ is such an interesting feature of control systems. Makes me so excited about the interdisciplinary nature of this programme- it’s very much needed for a topic that is so multidimensional!
Hi, Maryam. You get the point. It is a patriarchal social characteristic. Because of this, it is also difficult to address the issue of inequality. Interdisciplinarity is a fascinating topic, and I’m eager to learn something new.
Hi, Haiqing. I am Hanyu, the TA for the KIPP course in this year. I really enjoyed reading your blog, and it is really nice seeing your current thoughts on the inequality issues in China. It might be a good idea to change your profile name from the student number to your real name or nick name so that the others students could a find your posts more easily.
Hi, Hanyu. Thank you for you remind。 I have changed my profile now.