September 19, 2005
Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. 1970. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Sage Publications, 1990.
In this, one of his most influential books, Bourdieu describes how systems of education reproduce the cultural dominance of the ruling class. Drawing on the theories of Marx, Weber and Durkheim, Bourdieu points to the examination, academic language and certification as ways of concealing the class inequality inherent in the School as an institution. While the first half of his book is primarily theoretical, the second half draws on research conducted in French schools and universities.
In the Preface to the 1990 edition of Reproduction (which was originally published in 1970), Bourdieu writes that this book “sought to propose a model of the social mediations and processes which tend, behind the backs of the agents engaged in the school system—teachers, students and their parents—and often against their will, to ensure the transmission of cultural capital across generations and to stamp pre-existing differences in inherited cultural capital with a meritocratic seal of academic consecration by virtue of the special symbolic potency of the title (credential)” (x). Bourdieu argues that schools transmit “cultural capital”—by which he means any knowledge, skills, education or expectations—from one generation to the next, thus ensuring the dominance of the ruling class. Furthermore, this transfer is concealed by taking on the (supposedly) democratic form of examination and certification:
“ …in societies which claim to recognize individuals only as equals in right, the educational system and its modern nobility only contribute to disguise, and thus legitimize, in a more subtle way the arbitrariness of the distribution of powers and privileges which perpetuates itself through the socially uneven allocation of school titles and degrees” (x).
According to Bourdieu, schools wield a power that is at once arbitrary, self-concealing and self-propagating. In order to describe this power, Bourdieu introduces the term “Pedagogic Action (PA),” which he defines as a form of “symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power” (5). Bourdieu discusses the Pedagogic Action in a broader sociological context, pointing to the power structure inherent in families and governments. He then focuses in on the function of Pedagogic Action in schools, writing that, “If some people are nowadays able to believe in the possibility of a PA [Pedagogic Action] without obligation or punishment, this is the effect of an ethnocentrism which induces them not to perceive as such the sanctions of the mode of imposition characteristic of our societies. To overwhelm one’s pupils with affection as American primary school teachers do…is to gain possession of that subtle instrument of repression, the withdrawal of affection, a pedagogic technique which is no less arbitrary” (17).
In the second half of Reproduction, Bourdieu presents sociological research on French public schools, pointing out the ways in which working-class and female students are systematically excluded from institutions of higher learning. He argues that there are three primary ways in which schools use their pedagogic authority to perpetuate the dominance of the bourgeoisie: language, examinations and certification.
-Bourdieu on Language: “Of all the distancing techniques with which the institution equips its officers, magisterial discourse is the most efficacious and the most subtle: unlike the distances inscribe in space or guaranteed by regulation, the distance words create seems to owe nothing to the institution…The traditional professor may have abandoned his ermine and his gown, he may even chose to descend from his dais and mingle with the crowd, but he cannot abdicate his ultimate protection, the professorial use of a professorial language” (110)
-Bourdieu on Examinations: “…in order to carry out in full this function of social conservation, the school system must present the ‘moment of truth’ of the examination as its own objective reality: the elimination, subject solely to the norms of educational equity…conceals…the links between the school system and the structure of class relations” (159).
-Bourdieu on Certification: “In short, the diploma tends to prevent the relation between the diploma and occupational status from being related to the more uncertain relation between capacity and status; if this connection were made, it would raise the question of the relation between capacity and the diploma and so lead to a questioning of the reliability of the diploma, i.e. of everything that is legitimated by recognition of the reliability of diplomas” (165).
Bourdieu concludes by highlighting the many ways in which the bourgeoisie conceals inequality in schools by hiding behind democratic ideals: “Thus the most hidden and most specific function of the educational system consists in hiding its objective function, that is, masking the objective truth of its relationship to the structure of class relations” (208). Furthermore, he notes, because they are deprived of the cultural capital which is granted only to privileged students, the lower classes are unaware of these institutional inequalities. “In matters of culture,” Bourdieu writes, “absolute dispossession excludes awareness of being dispossessed” (210).
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