Education and work readings week 1
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital.
The structure of the distribution of the different types -and subtypes of capital at a given moment in
time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e., the set of constraints, inscribed in
the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances
of success for practices.
Capital consists of:
- Economic capital money
- Cultural capital institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications
- Social capital connections
Cultural capital
Helps to explain the unequal scholastic achievement of children from different social classes by
relating academic success to the difference in cultural capital between classes. Because this idea is
neglected in educational systems, the best hidden and socially most determinant educational
investment ‘domestic transmission of cultural capital’ is maintained.
Consists of:
The embodied state
- Long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body. Linked to the body, culture, Bildung. A
process of embodiment, incorporation which costs time. Embodied capital, external wealth
converted into an integral part of the person, into a habitus, cannot be transmitted
instantaneously, unlike money.
- So how can this capital be bought? Cultural capital can be acquired depending on the period,
the society, and the social class, in the absence of any deliberate inculcation, and therefore
quite unconsciously. It always remains marked by its earliest conditions of acquisition which,
through the more or less visible marks they leave, help to determine its distinctive value.
- The most powerful principle of the symbolic efficacy of cultural capital lies in the logic of its
transmission. The transmission of cultural capital is the best hidden form of hereditary
transmission of capital, and it therefore receives proportionately greater weight in the
system of reproduction strategies, as the direct, visible forms of transmission tend to be
more strongly censored and controlled.
Objectified state
- Cultural goods that are transmissible in its materiality, e.g. books, art, paintings.
- Can be appropriated both materially (economic capital) and symbolically (cultural capital)
Institutionalized state
- Educational qualifications
- Academic qualification makes it possible to compare qualification holders and exchange
them. It can establish conversion rates between cultural capital and economic capital by
guaranteeing the monetary value of a given academic capital: the conversion of economic
capital into cultural capital establishes the value of the holder of a given qualification relative
to other qualification holders. Also it states the monetary value for which it can be
exchanged on the labor market.
,Social capital
Resources in a durable network of connections, membership in a group in which the members can
help you attain something.
The reproduction of social capital presupposes an unceasing effort of sociability, a continuous series
of exchanges in which recognition is endlessly affirmed and reaffirmed.
Phenomena such as the ‘personality cult’ or the identification of parties, trade unions, or movements
with their leader are latent in the very logic of representation. Everything combines to cause the
signifier to take the place of the signified.
Conversions
The different types of 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. The transformation of economic capital into social capital presupposes a specific
labor, i.e., an apparently gratuitous expenditure of time, attention, care, concern, which, as seen in
the endeavor to personalize a gift, has the effect of transfiguring the purely monetary import of the
exchange and the very meaning of the exchange.
The convertibility of the different types of capital is the basis of the strategies aimed at ensuring the
reproduction of capital. Cultural capital, whose diffuse, continuous transmission within the family
escapes observation and control (so that the educational system seems to award its honors solely to
natural qualities) and which is increasingly tending to attain full efficacy, at least on the labor market,
only when validated by the educational system, i.e., converted into a capital of qualifications, is
subject to a more disguised but more risky transmission than economic capital.
Thus the more the official transmission of capital is prevented or hindered, the more the effects of
the clandestine (verborgen) circulation of capital in the form of cultural capital become determinant
in the reproduction of the social structure. As an instrument of reproduction capable of disguising its
own function, the scope of the educational system tends to increase.
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. (1979). The Inheritors.
Blindness to social inequalities both obliges and allows one to explain all inequalities, particularly
those in educational achievement, as natural inequalities, unequal giftedness. The formal equality of
education transforms privilege into merit, since it allows the influence of social origin to operate ,
though through more secret channels.
Solution: examine the level of achievement relative to the point of departure, so examine the slope
of the curve and not the point.
There is no room for inequalities in the standardized tests: fundamentally unequal individuals all take
the same test and selection procedures only take into account performances measured by the
academic criterion.
Charisma ideology supplies the privileged classes with a legitimation of their cultural privileges, which
are thereby transformed from a social heritage into individual merit = CLASS DISCRIMINATION.
Nothing emerges to contradict the implicit ideology of the university and of university success. All
value is incarnated in the child prodigy.
Because academic achievements are not perceived as linked to a certain social situation, academic
failure is naturally imputed to a lack of gifts.
, The school system multiplies social inequalities because the most disadvantaged classes helps to
bring it upon themselves. They are too conscious of their destiny and too unconscious of the ways in
which it is brought about. It is not sufficient to observe that school culture is a class culture; to
proceed as if it were only that, is to help it remain so.
Contemporary pedagogy: psychological foundation, serve a system which does not and will not
recognize social differences.
Rational pedagogy: dependent on the knowledge of socially conditioned cultural inequality and on
the decision to reduce it, neutralize the effect of the social factors of cultural inequality.
Students from the cultured classes are those best prepared to adapt themselves to a system of
diffuse, implicit requirements, since they implicitly possess the means of satisfying those
requirements. Students from the lower classes are the first to suffer from all the charismatic and
traditional vestiges and who are inclined to expect and demand everything from education. They are
also the first to benefit from an effort to give everyone the set of social ‘gifts’ which constitute the
reality of cultural privilege.
Truly democratic education = unconditional goal of enabling individuals to appropriate as completely
as possible the most possible number of abilities which constitute school culture.
Traditional education = train and select a well-born elite.
Technocratic education = aimed at mass production of made-to-measure specialists.
Bourdieu, P. (1999). The contradictions of inheritance.
The order of succession = managing the relationship between parents and children and the
perpetuation (vereeuwigen) of the line and its inheritance.
- Perpetuating the social position of the father by distinguishing oneself from him, to go
beyond him and to deny him.
- Transmission of inheritance depends on the judgments made by the school system
The son’s identification with the father’s desire as a desire for preservation produces an
unproblematic inheritor. Inheritors who accept inheriting the inheritance, who accept being
inherited by the inheritance, and who succeed in appropriating that inheritance, escape the
contradictions of succession.
A great many people are long-term sufferers from the gap between their accomplishments and the
parental expectations they can neither satisfy nor repudiate (verwerpen).
If the identification with the father and with his ‘project’ doubtless constitutes a necessary condition
for the smooth transmission of the inheritance, it is nevertheless not a sufficient condition for
achieving succession.
The relationship between the often essentialist and totalizing degrees of the school system and the
parental judgments made both prior to, and especially as a consequence of, those of the school.
It is as if the father’s position set a line not to be crossed, a line which, once internalized, becomes a
kind of prohibition against dissent, against setting oneself apart, against rejection or breaking away.
Ambivalence: he cannot want his son to identify with his own position and its dispositions, and yet all
his behavior works continuously to produce that identification, in particular the body language that
contributes so powerfully to fashioning the whole manner of being/the habitus. He both wishes and
