Schools reward the cultural habits of advantaged families as though they were ability, so an institution designed to sort by merit sorts partly by origin.
Bourdieu and Passeron's argument is that the school does not need to discriminate to reproduce advantage: it needs only to treat as natural talent the vocabulary, references and manner that some homes supply and others do not. The mechanism is invisible to the institution precisely because it experiences itself as neutral.
In practice
- An admissions process rewarding confident articulacy has measured something households differ in.
- A firm hiring for polish selects on rehearsal opportunity and records it as potential.
- Standing
- Compare concerted cultivation, which describes the parenting practices, and cultural capital, which names the resource.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Learning & Education
- Essay
- Theories of teaching, and what schools are for