Work · Sociology & Social Theory
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture
Written with Jean-Claude Passeron: schools reward a familiarity with language and culture that children of educated families bring from home, and so turn inherited advantage into apparent individual merit – a “symbolic violence” that also those it disadvantages accept as legitimate.
Introduction
Bourdieu and Passeron published La Reproduction with Éditions de Minuit in 1970, six years after their study of students, Les Héritiers. Book I, “Foundations of a Theory of Symbolic Violence”, is set out as numbered propositions with commentary, starting from the claim that all pedagogic action is objectively symbolic violence, because it imposes a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power. Book II applies the theory to the French education system, drawing on surveys of students’ command of language and on examination results: by valuing a relation to language and culture that pupils from educated families acquire at home, the school converts social privilege into academic merit and so helps to legitimate the existing order. Richard Nice’s English translation appeared in 1977. The book became a standard reference in the sociology of education; Raymond Boudon proposed a competing explanation in 1973 based on families’ educational decisions, and other critics found the theory too deterministic to account for change.
Connections
Taken up in
- Distinction1979 · Pierre Bourdieu
More works by Pierre Bourdieu
- 1979Distinction
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