Ethnic vs Social Boundaries: Children of Migrants in Schools

Abstract

Children of migrants tend to end up in schools that accommodate mostly those pupils and students who do not conform to the socially shared notion of the “norm”, such as disabled children or children from disadvantaged families. In the recent years, the emergence of various problems in schools has been increasingly thought of as related precisely to the presence of migrant children, the latter being first and foremost associated with incomers from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Social issues that schools traditionally used to cope with are being displaced by ethnic issues and various questions of adaptation. The article examines the ways in which school segregation arises and shows what factors account for the higher concentration of migrant children in certain schools and what problems both pupils and teachers in such schools have to face.