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Summary Education & Work
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A summary of the literature and lecture of education and work. Includes connections between literature.
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Education and Work course summaryWeek 1 Social reproduction in education
Balazs & Sayad: interview with principal about violence at school and the system. Teachers
and students transfer out all the time. Principal doesn’t like the system: even though teachers
want to help, they can’t. Lots of tension at school. Students that are angry at the institution
take it out on teachers. Issues get worse if kids struggle with poverty and family issues.
F&L Introduction: the privileged understand the rules of the game (without knowing it).
Most of the privileged believe that they achieve their success through their own merit. The
ability to land merit and how it is connected to a person’s background is central in this book.
Video on unequal childhoods: class differences in family life. There are different styles of
child rearing. Working class families: direct, strict, however children still have a lot of
freedom. Middle class families: children learn to talk back to authority, are taught skills that
are valued by schools, jobs, and institutions. Decade later, middle class families off to
college, working class families going down the staircase. Recommendation: cultural
knowledge and social capital.
Bourdieu Contradictions of Inheritance: managing the relationship between parents and
children is fundamental. Parents want their child to either follow the same path or surpass
them. Otherwise they believe that they have failed as parents.
Bourdieu & Passeron: anonymous examinations make us believe that everyone is given an
equal opportunity. but then we’re allowing privilege to do its magic. To make education equal
we should make the education part count, but that creates the problem that the most value is
given to work which has the most educational ambition behind it. Students regard what they
do/produce as a product of what they are → if they do bad in school then they are bad.
Bourdieu forms of capital: the forms of capital influence academic success. Both social &
cultural capital are reproduced intergenerationally. Social & economic capital can be derived
from economic capital, but only at the cost of a more or less great effort of transformation,
which is needed to produce the type of power effective in the field in question.
Lecture: Introduction to Bourdieu, focusing mainly on his reproduction thesis (reproduction
in education) while The Class Ceiling focuses more on reproduction in (elite) workplaces.
The ones with better cultural capital in education are better prepared for academic material,
are better at grasping “abstract” and intellectual concepts, and are favoured by teachers (e.g.
because they do well in school). Thus, students from a less privileged background are at a
disadvantage. Dominance is hidden in the educational system and that is why it works so
well. We can use other capital to transform into cultural capital → shadow tutoring uses
economic capital and transforms it into more knowledge
Bourdieu’s main concepts – field, habitus, and capital (economic, social, and cultural). Field
is the foundation: depending on the field, your capital and/or habitus will or won’t land. You
have to kind of carve out your own field. The best player doesn’t dominate the game but
knows how to adjust to it → you have to see all three, because if you focus too much on one
, of them, you don’t see the whole game. Practice is between field and habitus. People will
know if you don’t have the right habitus.
Bourdieu’s claims (related to education): people do not come completely self-made → works
differently in different social spaces; there are many fields; fields of education often work to
keep dominant classes more powerful and less dominant positions less powerful → hiding
how this happens, but it is usually unintentional → it’s not deliberate manipulation but a
natural way of “downgrading”. Dominant people are dominant but also dominated by their
own domination (e.g. more inequality isn’t good for them either). Reproduction through
education works because dominant and especially dominated get caught up in habitus-based
symbolic violence
Class-based inequalities are growing
Wrap up/ Discussion Points
● What are 3 main types of capital? Others?
○ Cultural, Social, Economic + Symbolic
● What are 3 types of cultural capital?
○ Embodied, Objectified, Institutional
● What is meant by ‘conversions’ of forms of capital?
○ Using one form of capital to gain another, e.g. having upper class cultural
capital (i.e. the correct aesthetic disposition & highbrow sensibility) at 6TV
gets you economic capital (by being in a higher, more lucrative position)
● How do distributions of capital relate to intergenerational reproduction of class
positions?
○ Embodied capital can be accumulated, produce profits, & reproduce itself +
structure of distribution of capitals represent structure of social world → if
capital can be reproduced & the distribution reflects society, then one’s class
position can be reproduced intergenerationally due to reproduction of capital
● What is the role of education in reproductive strategies?
○ Education uses habitus-based symbolic violence, which is hidden & usually
unintentional, by rewarding those exposed to legitimated/highbrow culture &
claiming to award honors based purely on “natural qualities”
● Why is this role clandestine?
○ Because with modernization & individualization, visible ways of transmitting
power & privilege became frowned upon, censored, & controlled, so hidden
forms (i.e. cultural capital) replaced them [by seeming equal but still
rewarding upper classes & ignoring the importance of CC itself]
● Why might Pierre Bourdieu be seen as a sociologist of power and/or practice and/or
symbolic violence in worlds of education and work?
○ Because he talks about the importance of power structures, symbolic violence,
& dominant vs. dominated groups to the reproduction of inequality, which is
done through educational systems [that reward upper classes], which in turn
affect labor market outcomes [where the system rewards legitimated education
& credentials, thus legitimated forms of cultural capital]
Connection different readings/themes?
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