3

Education, socio-cultural reproduction and class

Introduction

Bourdieu first came to the notice of the Anglophone academy as a sociologist of education. His three major works in this area (all coauthored) appeared in French in a relatively tight timeframe of just six years (1964–70). They represent a program of research that was undertaken over a decade, with most of the fieldwork being carried out in the first few years. This body of research helped to develop a theoretical apparatus that culminated in Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1990, first published in French in 1970).

Within this relatively constrained timeframe, Bourdieu conducted an extensive sociological inquiry into the French education system, which he knew as a successful insider—albeit as a ‘wonder boy’ (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: 161) whose success was, in class background terms, statistically unlikely. He refers to his work in The Inheritors as ‘only the beginning’ (Bourdieu & Passeron 1979a: vii), and describes Reproduction as a ‘work of youth’ (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: x). Despite these qualifications, the three main works on education are significant because they not only show the working processes behind some of the main components of Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus, but they also made an influential contribution to the sociology of education, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s. However, as Harker (1990: 86) points out, if we confine ourselves to these three books when using Bourdieu’s theoretical approach to think about education, we will be missing the point: they represent only a part of Bourdieu’s sociology of education work. Although he was not to publish another book specifically on education—Homo Academicus (1988) is more concerned with reflexivity than university education—texts such as Distinction (1989) and The State Nobility (1996) are derived from and closely follow Bourdieu’s sociology of education work. This chapter deals mainly with issues of cultural reproduction and symbolic power as addressed in the three ‘education’ books; later developments in these areas are taken up in other chapters.

Bourdieu approached his research on education as an inquiry into social structures and relations of power. Weber and Durkheim both preceded him in this inquiry, and Durkheim in particular influenced his thinking, if only by failing to extend his analysis of the French education system, which Bourdieu otherwise admired (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: 195–8), by underplaying the issue of power. In Reproduction, Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 198) note that Durkheim fails to realize that not all school systems exist purely to conserve the culture inherited from the past, and that ‘pedagogic conservatism’, where it occurs, is the ally of ‘social and political conservatism’, and thus ‘contributes…to the maintenance of “the social order”’. Conservatism, for Bourdieu, is a common but not universal result of the key function of maintaining social order. This link between education and the maintenance of social order was to be reformulated in his work in terms of the way in which symbolic power is utilized by the education system to exercise symbolic violence that upholds and sustains the cultural arbitrary of the dominant classes.

The Inheritors (Bourdieu & Passeron 1979b, first French publication 1964) and the works that make up Academic Discourse (Bourdieu, Passeron & Saint Martin 1994, first French publication 1965) were written while Bourdieu was in the process of developing the theoretical framework and concepts that characterized his later work. In his preface to the American edition of The Inheritors (1979b: vii), Bourdieu explains that the research was ‘intended to mark a break with the prevailing tradition in the sociology of education’, and that it was to do this by ‘outlin[ing] a program for a sociology of cultural reproduction as a dimension of social reproduction’. The ‘chief virtue’ of the book, he writes, is ‘the effort it makes to hold together aspects of the social world which the traditions and divisions of social science tended to keep apart’ (1979b: vii).

One of Bourdieu and Passeron’s key concerns in The Inheritors is the relationship between social origin and academic achievement within the educational system in France. In the prefatory note to the 1964 edition, the authors justify the focus of the book on ‘an analysis of cultural privilege’ as a ‘risk that had to be taken, in order to grasp the fundamental problem which the ritual problematic in this area almost always manages to conceal’ (Bourdieu & Passeron 1979b: ix). They argue that an important aspect of academic success is the sense of social ‘ease’ that membership of a dominant class confers: ‘thus ironic casualness, mannered elegance, or the statutory assurance which lends ease or the affectation of ease are almost always the mark of students from the upper classes, where such manners signal membership in the elite’ (1979b: 20). They also contend that ‘the most privileged students derive from their background of origin habits, skills and attitudes which serve them directly in their scholastic tasks’ and that their studies also profit from their inherited ‘knowledge and know-how, tastes, and…“good taste”’ (1979b: 17), which enables them to transform ‘social privilege into individual gifts or merits’ (1979b: 27). Bourdieu and Passeron’s analysis of this process, which is outlined in both The Inheritors and Academic Discourse (Bourdieu, Passeron & Saint Martin 1994) is extended, with greater theoretical nuance, in Reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990), where they recast the discussion in terms of symbolic violence, power and domination.

Two related issues that are important to Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of education are the processes that determine the selection of students for progression through the educational system, and the necessary blindness on the part of participants to the function of school as a system of socio-cultural reproduction. In all three of the sociology of education books, Bourdieu and his co-researchers emphasize the effects of selection. In The Inheritors, they claim that ‘the educational system objectively effects an elimination which is steadily more thorough, the less privileged the social class’, and point out that it is not just a matter of less privileged students being ejected from the educational system. There are ‘other, more hidden forms of educational inequality…such as the relegation of working class or lower-middle-class students to certain disciplines, or the fact that they fall behind and mark time in their progress through school’ (Bourdieu & Passeron 1979b: 2). The possibility of undertaking higher education, for instance, is predicated upon ‘a selection process which, throughout the school system, is applied with very unequal severity, depending on the student’s social origin. In fact, for the most disadvantaged classes, it is purely and simply a matter of elimination’ (1979b: 2). This argument is extended in Academic Discourse. Bourdieu, Passeron and Saint Martin (1994: 41) claim that working-class children are both eliminated from the system more frequently and, if they do ‘reach higher education…[they] have…necessarily undergone greater selection than other groups’ (1994: 41). They point out that, as well as class, gender also influences the chances of selection, noting that in both cases the individuals who do get through the system have often had to do better than most of the other students in their subject area: girls who studied Greek, for instance, tended to score very highly on the tests administered by the research team (1994: 45).

In Reproduction (1990), Bourdieu and Passeron refine and develop their argument regarding the process of selection. They note (1990: 71) that, ‘When we first started our research, we began with the intention of treating the pedagogic relation as a simple relation of communication and measuring its efficiency.’ However, they came to realize that, in order to understand how and why some students succeed in the education system and others do not, it was not enough to understand the processes of communication in the classroom or the figures of student retention throughout the various levels of education. In order to grasp what was happening, it was necessary to recognize the ‘systematic relationship’ that existed between ‘the two systems of relations subsumed under the two concepts linguistic capital and degree of selection’ (1990: 72–3). Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 87) explain that:

It is the system of factors, acting as a system, which exerts the indivisible action of a structural causality on behavior and attitudes and hence on success and elimination, so that it would be absurd to try to isolate the influence of any one factor…at the different moments of the process or in the different structures of factors.

This reformulates the argument first made in Academic Discourse (Bourdieu, Passeron & Saint Martin 1994: 40–1, 51) that there is no point in measuring, at any given point in time, a feature such as participation in the education system in terms of gender or class. Bourdieu and Passeron argue that such measurements are always meaningless, in that they never tell us about the subjects’ trajectories through time in relation to a given set of social structures or contexts. Sociologists, according to Bourdieu and Passeron, are ‘liable to forget that, unlike strictly logical structures, the structures sociology deals with are the product of transformations which, unfolding in time, cannot be considered as reversible…since they express the successive states of a process that is aetiologically irreversible’ (1990: 88). This focus on selection, first identified as an aspect of class privilege in The Inheritors, contributed to Bourdieu’s recognition of the importance of the nature of social structures and their interconnection over time, and to the development of the concepts of cultural field (with its focus on the intersections of specific social forces) and habitus. And it also reinforced Bourdieu’s growing commitment to the importance of exercising a high degree of reflexivity in the construction of the research object.

For Bourdieu the process of selection throughout each student’s school trajectory is a function of the educational system’s role in serving the interests of the dominant classes in society, and he and his co-authors use a range of metaphors, such as blindness, secrecy, masks, veils and hiddenness, in characterizing this phenomenon. In The Inheritors, Bourdieu and Passeron (1979b: 67–8) argue that what is hidden is the advantage that class confers in the educational system:

Blindness to social inequalities both obliges and allows one to explain all inequalities, particularly those in educational achievement, as natural inequalities, unequal giftedness. Such an attitude is part of the logic of a system which is based on the postulate of the formal equality of all pupils, as a precondition of its operation, and cannot recognize any inequalities other than those arising from individual gifts.…[Those who argue that] the concours gives everyone an equal opportunity…forget that the formal equality provided by the concours merely transforms privilege into merit, since it allows the influence of social origin to operate, though through more secret channels.

One of the things that is hidden—or, to use Bourdieu’s later terminology, misrecognized—in this process is the role that education plays in valorizing and naturalizing privilege: ‘What might be called the charisma ideology…supplies the privileged classes with a legitimation of their cultural privileges…transmuted from a social heritage into individual grace or a personal merit. Behind this mask, “class racism” can be flaunted without ever being seen for what it is’ (1979b: 69–70). Bourdieu, Passeron and Saint Martin (1994: 21) return to this theme in Academic Discourse: ‘the ability to manipulate academic language remains the principal factor in success at examinations. Here we encounter one of the most important, though most hidden, mediations between the social origins of children [and] their scholastic fates.’

However, in Academic Discourse another layer is added to the analysis of the relationship between education systems and the social structures in which they are situated. The relationship is no longer portrayed simply as one where members of the privileged classes are able to assume that they are intellectually gifted, but rather one where the education system works to inculcate and buttress the structures that support privilege: ‘Traditional teaching uses words to seduce. Through a process of osmosis it promotes the transmission of an already confirmed and legitimate culture, and secures commitment to the values which this contains’ (Bourdieu, Passeron & Saint Martin 1994: 20).

Academic Discourse was published in French in 1965, but it did not appear in a complete form in an English translation until 1994. It comprises a collection of essays focusing on research conducted by Bourdieu and colleagues over several years prior to 1965, with a focus on the use of language in the education system (at the secondary and tertiary levels). Although it is not stated explicitly, it seems that the research initially was undertaken in the hope that the insights gained would lead to ‘rationalizing the uses of language in teaching [which] could constitute a decisive step forward in democratizing the academic universe’ (Bourdieu, Passeron & Saint Martin 1994: 22). In certain ways, this overlaps with work being carried out by the educational linguist Basil Bernstein. Both Bourdieu and Bernstein were interested in the role of education in the process of social reproduction, along with the related issues of the role of language in educational achievement and the relationships between language, education and class. The affinities and differences between their research have been noted by writers such as Archer (1983), Cause (2010), Collins (2000) and Harker and May (1993) and, to a lesser extent, by Bernstein and Bourdieu themselves. Archer (1983: 196) suggests that, ‘The work of Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu is often seen as the beginning of a new synthesis in the sociology of education which will lead to a theoretical reunification of large scale structural analysis with the study of more immediate processes of interaction’. Harker and May (1993: 171) take a different position, arguing that despite the similarities in the object of their research, Bernstein’s insistence on separating ‘the underlying, regulative structures (codes) from their surface realisations’ gives his work a more structuralist orientation, whereas Bourdieu’s theoretical developments allow him to successfully articulate micro- and macro-level analyses of social practice (1993: 176).

The work on language gathered together in Academic Discourse is important because it constituted a major step in developing Bourdieu’s understanding of the systemic nature of the relation between the field of education and the processes and mechanisms of symbolic domination. Bourdieu, Passeron and Saint Martin (1994: 3) state, ‘There can be no prospect of achieving real change until it is recognized that teaching is a system…research into the causes of linguistic misunderstanding which characterizes the teaching relationship must extend to the functions which this failure serves in perpetuating the system.’ Initially, the researchers’ ‘concern was to understand and to explain the nature of communication between university teachers and their students—a social phenomenon marked by specific institutional constraints and traditions’ (1994: 35). However, they soon came to see that constraints and traditions were derived from outside the education system. Bourdieu, Passeron and Saint Martin (1994: 55–6) argue that class experience (and, by extension, family history and experience) is integral to understanding the way in which meanings are derived from a complex system of relationships, and that, ‘The real experiences described by these abstractions assume concrete, unitary and meaningful form only thanks to the fact that they are constituted by the class situation, the point from which every possible view unfolds and upon which no single point of view is possible’. For Bourdieu, language—important though it initially appears to be in the success or failure of university students—is not in fact the key. Much more important are the social contexts in which language skills are both transmitted and ascribed a particular value within the market for linguistic capital.

The other important idea developed in Academic Discourse and then extended in Reproduction is the notion of a complicity between teachers and students in maintaining a system that both groups can see is not actually working as it should, or as it claims to:

What makes this complicity possible, as the intersection of the complicity of each partner with himself, is the fact that the ideological relationship of student and teacher to their own practices operates with reference to the same objective end. They are products of a traditional system, which focuses on maximizing security. (Bourdieu, Passeron and Saint Martin 1994: 23–4)

In his 1990 preface to the English edition of Reproduction, Bourdieu (1990a: ix–x) rephrased these ideas, aligning them more directly with the theoretical framework that was used in his later work:

In [Academic Discourse], we examined the social construction of the multilevel social relation of classroom understanding in and through misunderstanding to reveal the process whereby students and teachers come to agree, by a sort of tacit transaction tacitly guided by the concern to minimize costs and risks in a situation that neither controls fully, on a minimal working definition of the situation of communication. [Against a 1960s/70s background of visions of mobility, the end of class and similar notions] Reproduction sought to propose a model of the social mediations and processes which tend, behind the back 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).

In Reproduction, Bourdieu utilizes a different and more developed theoretical framework than was the case in his previous educational texts—one designed specifically to objectivize the object of research. As Bottomore (1990: xiv) points out in his foreword to the book, theory and empiricism ‘are very closely connected, the theoretical propositions arising on one side from the needs of research, and on the other side being constructed or elaborated in order to make possible empirical testing’. Reproduction brings together insights derived from Bourdieu’s research in Algeria, Béarn and in the French education system to formulate an argument about the nature of cultural reproduction:

Every power to exert symbolic violence, i.e. every power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are at the basis of its force, adds its own specifically symbolic force to those power relations…this axiom [is] a principle of the theory of sociological knowledge. (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: 4)

Education and socio-cultural reproduction

In his sociology of education books, Bourdieu argues that the types of education enacted in the family and at school constitute a form of symbolic violence, because they involve the selection and imposition of specific cultural forms that tend to legitimize pre-existing power relations. At the same time, ‘every PA [pedagogic action] requires as the condition of its exercise the social misrecognition of the objective truth of [pedagogic action]’ (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: 12). That is, for pedagogic action to be completely successful in legitimating a given set of power relations, it should never be apparent to the transmitter or receiver of the pedagogic action that education reinforces social hierarchies and power differentials. For Bourdieu, the dominated are complicit in their domination and this complicity is partly made possible by the hidden nature of the violence to which they are subjected. As Bourdieu argues, symbolic violence enacted through and by way of the education system is often more effective and easier to sustain than regimes of power that rely upon threats of physical violence: ‘The School is better able than ever…in the only way conceivable in a society wedded to democratic ideologies, to contribute to the reproduction of the established order, since it succeeds better than ever in concealing the function it performs’ (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: 167). The salient point of pedagogic action, from this perspective, is to authorize and valorize without appearing to do so, and to create and maintain a situation that it purports to be describing. In Reproduction, the notion of symbolic violence is utilized to address the question of how socio-cultural domination reproduces itself, both over time and at an everyday level. Language, as the key medium of symbolic domination, is a central aspect of this process.

In The Inheritors and Academic Discourse, Bourdieu emphasizes the importance of a diachronic analysis of familial and social processes to an understanding of how the education system ‘does its work’. This theme is continued in Reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: ix, 73), and is extended to include the concepts of the habitus and cultural capital. Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 30) explicitly identify the ‘earliest phase of upbringing’ as a key stage in the inculcation of a cultural arbitrary and its relation to evaluative regimes of cultural capital. They characterize cultural capital as:

The cultural goods transmitted by the different family [pedagogic actions], whose value qua cultural capital varies with the distance between the cultural arbitrary imposed by the dominant [pedagogic action] and the cultural arbitrary inculcated by the family [pedagogic action] within the different groups or classes.

They also argue that the process of pedagogic action has to be carried out, by pedagogic work, over a sufficiently long period of time to create the durable, transposable and exhaustive habitus (1990: 34), and:

Insofar is it is a prolonged process of inculcation producing internalization of the principles of a cultural arbitrary in the form of a durable, transposable habitus, capable of generating practices conforming with those principles outside of and beyond any express regulation or any explicit reminding of the rule [pedagogic work] enables the group or class which delegates its authority to [pedagogic action] to produce and reproduce its intellectual and moral integration without resorting to external repression or, in particular, physical coercion. (1990: 36)

The value and significance of this theoretical work is immediately obvious. In the previous two books Bourdieu had difficulty articulating the links between class, educational success, and the apparent necessity of dissimulating the links between these two factors. Habitus and cultural capital allowed him to demonstrate how class relations defined ‘the primordial conditions of production of the differences between habitus’ (1990: 203). Schools align their teaching to the already acquired habitus of the dominant classes, thus ignoring the needs of students who arrive with a different habitus (1990: 128). What is in play and activated in this process, and what works to ensure its efficacy, is the complicity of the habitus of teachers, students and the field of education more generally:

More profoundly, only an adequate theory of the habitus, as the site of the internalization of externality and the externalizations of internality, can fully bring to light the social conditions of performance of the function of legitimating the social order, doubtless the best concealed of all the functions of the School. (1990: 205)

A specific form of cultural capital—of particular interest in the context of education—is linguistic capital. Language is, in the first instance, transmitted in the family context and is part of the cultural capital that the child brings to school. In a later work on the economy of linguistic exchanges, Bourdieu (2005b: 82) describes how this capital is formed within the family context, and how the subjects come to have a sense of the value of the ‘linguistic products’ offered on the market in exchange for cultural capital:

We have not learned to speak simply by hearing a certain kind of speech spoken but also by speaking, thus by offering a determinate form of speech on a determinate market. This occurs through exchanges within a family occupying a particular position in social space and thus presenting the child’s imitative propensity with models and sanctions that diverge more or less from legitimate usage. And we have learned the value that the products offered on this primary market, together with the authority which it provides, receive on other markets (like that of the school). The system of successive reinforcements or refutations has thus constituted in each one of us a certain sense of the social value of linguistic usages and of the relation between the different usages and the different markets, which organizes all subsequent perceptions of linguistic products, tending to endow it with considerable stability.

Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 73) argue that the closer the alignment is between the child’s linguistic capital and the language used and legitimated within the school, the more advantaged the child will be: ‘The influence of linguistic capital, particularly manifest in the first years of schooling when the understanding and use of language are the major points of leverage for teachers’ assessments, never ceases to be felt: style is always taken into account.’

In The Inheritors, Bourdieu and Passeron (1979b: 22) identify language as one of a collection of markers of privilege and ‘class cultural habits’ (1979b: 22), and in Academic Discourse they extend their thinking to take into consideration the links between language, class privilege and education, and more specifically the point that ‘what we inherit from our social origins is not only a language, but—inseparably—a relationship to language…and [its] value’ (Bourdieu, Passeron & Saint Martin 1994: 21). Bourdieu, Passeron and Saint Martin (1994: 51) argue that ‘language ability’ is:

the expression not of a series of partial connections, but of a structure in which it is the complex system of relationships which determines the meaning of any particular association…Indeed, it is through all the components of a school career as a whole—choice of curriculum stream or of programme, type of school attended, and previous success—that the direct influence of family background is relayed by being translated into a properly scholastic logic.

This linkage of language to educational outcomes is made explicit in Reproduction. Only through the framework of a

theoretical model such as one which interrelates the two systems of relations subsumed under the two concepts linguistic capital and degree of selection is capable of bringing to light the system of facts which it constructs as such by setting up a systematic relationship between them…language is not simply an instrument of communication: it also provides…a more or less complex system of categories, so that the capacity to decipher and manipulate complex structures…depends partly on the complexity of the language transmitted by the family (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: 72–3).

Interestingly, in this passage Bourdieu and Passeron seem to accept the idea that the language of the dominant classes is a more complex system, and thus confers superior abilities to ‘manipulate complex structures’, rather than suggesting that complexity is only identified and valorized in certain privileged forms of discourse. However, regardless of whether the language of the dominant classes is in some objective way more complex and thus more fitted for educational work, the evaluative regime that privileges that language still continues to be applied at every stage of students’ linguistic careers, and plays a part in determining their chances for continuation and success in, or elimination from, the education system. Thus the students most likely to succeed and least likely to be eliminated are those whose own cultural and linguistic capital is derived from family backgrounds of the dominant classes: they bring to school the forms of capital that the school system recognizes as legitimate. The students who are most likely to be high achievers are those who can recognize, imitate, acquire and assimilate the forms of linguistic and cultural capital valued by the school system. This process does not entail the complete elimination of students from dominated classes: it is not only acceptable, but desirable, that some students from the dominated classes succeed, because it gives the impression and maintains the doxa that the system is open to everyone, regardless of class background. The occasional success of these students facilitates the notion that success at school is merit based, rather than being a game loaded in favour of the dominant.

Bourdieu’s work on education, and specifically the habitus, has often been charged with being deterministic—a contention he has consistently denied (Bourdieu 1990b: 116–18). However, one area in which he does imply that there is no possibility of change is in the nature of the education system as a system of cultural reproduction that supports the dominant classes in society. He argues that it is not that the education system cannot change its practices; rather, it cannot change the function of those practices. In all three of his sociology of education books, Bourdieu discusses the impossibility of introducing a ‘rational pedagogy’. In The Inheritors, he and Passeron (1979b: 73) explicitly state that ‘nothing is further from our minds than an appeal to so-called scientific pedagogy’. Such a pedagogy, by the nature of the social system within which it functioned, would fail to acknowledge the crucial role of social differences in educational engagement and success, and thus ‘would allow real inequalities to weigh more heavily than ever, with more justifications than ever’ (1979b: 74). Under the prevailing conditions, ‘A truly rational pedagogy…would…not be able to become a reality unless all the conditions for a true democratization of the recruitment of teachers and pupils were fulfilled, the first of which would be the setting up of a rational pedagogy’ (1979b: 76).

In Academic Discourse, Bourdieu, Passeron and Saint Martin return to the idea of a rational pedagogy, only to dismiss the idea as impossible to implement: ‘The whole of our previous analysis suggests that the propositions aimed at a rational teaching practice which flow from [our analysis] remain strictly utopian under present conditions’ (Bourdieu, Passeron & Saint Martin 1994: 23). They take much the same position in Reproduction: their argument is that while ‘Pedagogic work expressly guided by the methodical pursuit of maximum efficiency would thus tend consciously to reduce the gap between the level of transmission and level of reception’ (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: 126), a maximally efficient pedagogy would require a completely different education system and society. Only an educational field ‘serving another system of external functions and, correlatively, another state of the balance of power between the classes could make such a pedagogic action possible’ (1990: 127). In their discussion of rational pedagogy in The Inheritors, Bourdieu and Passeron (1979b: 57–8) recognize that it would lead to a very different kind of teaching, one that would, in all probability, devalue the role of the teacher in their own eyes:

If ever the student formed a rational and realistic image of his position, the professor would find himself confronted with demands which relegate him to the role of a teaching auxiliary. The professor’s occupational task would then become merely an aspect of an occupational project of which he is no longer the master and whose full significance lies beyond him.

Bourdieu claims that a rational pedagogy is impossible because it would subvert the key function of any educational system, which is the conservation of the social order. If the aim of a rational pedagogy was to ensure that all students benefited from the schooling process as fully as their intellectual and personal abilities allowed and if, in order to achieve that aim, schools had to teach in a way that legitimated the cultures of the dominated, then the current social order would be threatened. For teachers, whose position within the education system is tied to social hierarchies, a rational pedagogy of the sort Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 152–3) envisage would devalue their status in both fields.

When the first two books were written, Bourdieu and his collaborators were focusing on a French education system that was conservative and largely unchanged from their own childhoods, although enrolment rates at university had increased for students from all class backgrounds in France in the 1960s (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: 91). By 1970, when Reproduction was published, Bourdieu and Passeron could see that at least one change was taking place in the French education system, and it was modelled on the US university system, ‘which provides for the institutional resolution of the tensions resulting from the disparity between the aspirations it helps to instil and the social means of realizing them’ (1990: 218, n 36). Regarding the changes being carried out within the French system, they state:

If educational systems are nowadays increasingly resorting to the ‘soft approach’ to eliminate the classes most distant from school culture, despite its greater cost in time and material, the reason is that, as an institution of symbolic government condemned to disappoint in some the aspirations it encourages in all, the educational system must give itself the means of obtaining recognition of the legitimacy of its sanctions and their social effects, so that machinery and techniques for organized, explicit manipulation cannot fail to make their appearance when exclusion no longer suffices per se to impose internalization of the legitimacy of exclusion. (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: 209–10)

These ideas are extended and made more specific in the epilogue to The Inheritors, published in the US edition in 1979:

Whereas the old system with its strongly marked boundaries led to the internalizing of scholastic divisions clearly corresponding to social divisions, the new system with its fuzzy classifications and blurred edges encourages and entertains…aspirations that are themselves blurred and fuzzy. Aspiration levels are now adjusted to scholastic hurdles and standards in a less strict and also less harsh manner than under the old system, which was characterized by the remorseless rigor of the national competitive examination. It is true that the new system fobs off a good number of its users with devalued qualifications…However it does not force them into such abrupt ‘disinvestment’ as the old system. (Bourdieu & Passeron 1979a: 91–2)

These comments are essentially asides to the main arguments developed in Reproduction. However, they reinforce the argument that the function of the educational system is essentially impervious to change: their position is that more open educational systems perform in much the same way as rigorous and overtly hierarchical systems. Bourdieu and Passeron argue that more open systems no longer work to ensure that the dispossessed internalize their unsuitability for the academic world, but rather that they are never forced to confront it in any serious way, instead being fobbed off with ‘devalued qualifications’. With remarkable prescience, given that the book was written in 1970, Bourdieu and Passeron ask us to consider ‘the limiting case, [in which] one imagines universities which…would equip themselves with all the institutionalized instruments…and specialized personnel…required for the discreet, friendly manipulation of those whom the institution condemns, excludes or relegates’ (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: 218–19).

In most contemporary English-speaking universities, Bourdieu and Passeron’s limiting case is now the norm, particularly in terms of the growth in the last four decades of student learning and counselling services, and specialist support resources for targeted groups (women, ethnic minorities, migrants, refugees, LGBTQI students). In the 1990 preface to Reproduction, Bourdieu (1990a: x–xi) points out that this book, first published twenty years earlier, had ‘contributed’ to a ‘change of perspective’, which led to ‘a range of works that have emerged since and have entirely renewed our knowledge and understanding of the school, in both the United States and Great Britain’. It is certainly arguable that, in its turn, this research on the school system in the United States and the United Kingdom contributed to the changes in educational policy that Bourdieu characterizes as a ‘blurred and fuzzy’ move away from the ‘harshness’ and ‘rigor’ of the old systems. Some of this work focused on making visible the connection between privilege and educational success, which Bourdieu in his earliest analyses noted was so invisible. Researchers may have hoped that, once it became visible, policy efforts would focus on severing the connection. In fact, whether by design or because of the nature of misrecognition and illusion, the connection, rather than being severed, has been hidden more thoroughly by being hidden more ‘kindly’; the onus has been lifted from the unsuccessful student, and the student’s lack of success has, where possible, been hidden from view.

In The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu (1990c: 15) writes that ‘the principle of a more rigorous definition, less dependent on individual dispositions, of the proper relation to the object…is one of the most decisive conditions of truly scientific practice in the social sciences’. Reproduction is the first of the education books in which this idea is specifically set out. According to Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 101), if the object of observation had been constituted as a ‘student population defined independently of its relation to the population eliminated’, then it would not have been possible to provide a systemic explanation of the empirical variations, and they and their fellow researchers would have observed ‘only a population of survivors’. In order to avoid this trap, they needed to be careful and deliberate about what they took as their object of educational research, and in fact in their case ‘the true object of research’ was ‘the principles by which the school system selects a population whose pertinent properties, as it moves through the system, are increasingly the effect of the system’s own action of training, channelling and eliminating’ (1990: 101).

This statement incorporates two other important methodological issues that are explored in Reproduction: the relation between time and structure and the necessity of accounting for the role of time in the development of any given set of social relationships or outcomes, and of understanding the interconnected set of social structures in which those relationships and outcomes developed. Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 88) suggest that the techniques used by most sociologists are ‘implicitly…analytical and instantaneist’, and that multivariate analysis fails to show us how ‘the ensemble of synchronic relations it is dealing with’ came to that specific conjuncture (1990: 88). As they point out, there is little point in simply studying the population of student ‘survivors’ of the education system’s elimination processes if the aim is to understand educational outcomes in France. What is needed is a diachronic account of how the eliminated students came to be eliminated, and how that elimination relates to both school and social structures. Ultimately, it is ‘the system of factors, acting as a system, which exerts the indivisible action of a structural causality on behaviour and attitudes and hence on success and elimination, so that it would be absurd to try to isolate the influence of any one factor…at the different moments of the process or in the different structures of factors’ (1990: 87).

These systems of factors are ‘established only through the mediation of class membership’ (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: 204). It is one of the weaknesses of the argument in Reproduction that the concept of class is made to do so much work without ever being very thoroughly defined. However, Bourdieu and Passeron’s point here is that if the relationship is not anchored in class membership, then it is random and the systems can be linked up in any way—or, even worse, for the analyst they can take on a kind of fictive agency (1990: 204):

The effort to catalogue the external functions of the educational system [i.e.] the objective relations between this system and the other sub-systems, for example the economic system or value system, remains fictitious whenever the relations thereby established are not brought into relationship with the structure of the relations prevailing at a given moment between the social classes. (1990: 178)

Time and structure are also key elements in the theoretical concepts of habitus and field, and class plays a role in both. Bourdieu’s concern about the methodological importance of acknowledging the role played by time in the creation of social relationships and outcomes certainly influenced his decision to adopt and reanimate the scholastic notion of habitus (Bourdieu 1985: 13). The habitus is necessarily the product of time, of history (Bourdieu 1990b: 116; 1990c: 56), and thus when using the concept of habitus, the analyst necessarily also introduces the concept of the passage of time into the analysis. Similarly, the concept of cultural field helps to integrate a schematic representation of the interconnection of social systems and sub-systems. Throughout Reproduction, Bourdieu and Passeron stress the methodological necessity of recognizing the interplay of multiple social systems. They argue (1990: 101) that it is pointless to look at only one system because such a conceptualization of social interaction will inevitably lead to an uninformative analysis:

Analysis of the social and academic characteristics of the receivers of a pedagogic message is therefore meaningful only if it leads to the construction of the system of relations between, on the one side, the school system conceived as an institution for the reproduction of legitimate culture, determining inter alia the legitimate mode of imposition and inculcation of academic culture, and, on the other side, the social classes, characterized, with respect to the efficiency of pedagogic communication, by unequal distances from academic culture and different dispositions to recognize and acquire it. There would be no end to an enumeration of the impeccable and irreproachable omissions to which the sociology of education is condemned when it studies separately the school population and the organization of the institution and its system of values, as if it were dealing with two substantial realities whose characteristics pre-existed their interrelation.

They also point out that if researchers were to do this, they would inevitably commit errors such as focusing on notions such as ‘student aspirations’ and ‘parental motivation’:

Only by constructing the system of relations between the educational system and the structure of the relations between the social classes can one genuinely escape these reifying abstractions and produce relational concepts, such as probability of enrolment, disposition towards school, distance from academic culture, or degree of selection, which integrate into the unity of an explanatory theory properties linked to class membership … and pertinent properties of school organization. (1990: 102)

Although Bourdieu and Passeron do not use the term ‘cultural field’ very often in Reproduction, they recognize that the ways in which different social systems interact are a necessary part of any sociological analysis. They describe the ‘structure of class relations’ as ‘a field of forces’ which ‘defines the primordial conditions of the differences between habitus’ (1990: 203). The habitus, formed within the shaping context of class membership, mediates the interactions of subjects in ‘different areas of activity’ (1990: 204). The account of the mediating capacity of the habitus provides a way out of the ‘fashionable, fictitious dilemma’ (1990: 203) of a completely determining structuralism or the total creative freedom of the subject-as-individual. By positing a theoretical structure in which subjects are endowed with a habitus, created by practices generated by the (class) structure in which their family was situated, and which inevitably affects their interactions within an interrelated series of social systems, Bourdieu and Passeron provide a framework that recognizes the generative functions of structures, practices and habitus. This relational method does not—and does not claim to—produce a comprehensive description of any given set of social interactions and outcomes. As Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 102) point out regarding this example, it deals with ‘the school system treated only as a system of communication’, and thus over-simplifies the relationship between social class and education, presenting it primarily as a matter of communication. However, it is a necessary methodological abstraction if the research aim is to understand the consequences of relations between systems that power tends to keep hidden, such as the cultural politics that determines the homology between the habitus of the dominant classes and the habitus privileged in the school system.

Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 179–85) argue that what they call the technocratic, culturalist or configurationalist, and the radical analyses of the education system, each has its own approach to research, focusing on ‘productivity’ (1990: 179–85), culture and national characteristics (1990: 188–90) and ‘generic alienations’ (1990: 193–4) respectively. However, all these approaches fail to realize the importance of focusing on systems and systemic relationships, differentiation and the crucial role played by the level of autonomy of the school system. ‘[T]he relative autonomy of the educational system’, despite ‘its dependence on the structure of class relations’ (1990: 194), is an important factor in Bourdieu’s educational work. It is the autonomy of the educational system that allows it to exercise symbolic violence: because it is seen as autonomous in relation to the dominant classes, it is able to reinforce the legitimacy of the dominant culture. Thus a failure to take into account the relationship of the school system to the class system and the differentiated nature of the class experience (ideas that would later be expressed more clearly in the concepts of field and habitus) leads to an inability to recognize the all important ‘deniability’ that is facilitated by the relative autonomy of the school.

Bourdieu’s sociology of education is informed by what, in Reproduction, he and Passeron refer to as ‘comparative’ method of analysis (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: 141). Comparative method, as they use the term, compares specific social objects of research across cultures and/ or time. The aim is to establish what is inherent to a social object in any situation, and how this is related to the social systems in which that object exists or has developed. For Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 144),

there is no alternative to using the comparative method when one wants to separate out what derives from external demands and what derives from the way they are responded to, or what, in the case of a given system, derives from the generic tendencies every educational system owes to its essential function of inculcation, to the particular traditions of a university history, and to its social functions, which are never completely reducible to the technical function of communication and producing skills.

They use the ‘comparative method’ with regard to Koran schools, the Sophists and Zen masters (1990: 190) in order to identify and demonstrate the ‘characteristic tendency of every education system…to reinterpret and retranslate external demands in accordance with its essential function…[and to resist external demands by] invoking the traditions of autonomy bequeathed by a relatively autonomous history’ (1990: 191). Bourdieu and Passeron argue that this method is more useful than both culturalist analysis, where ‘The presumption that a leap of pure intuition can take one straight to the very principle of the cultural system is particularly ineffectual in the case of class societies, where it dispenses one from preliminary analysis of the different types or levels of practice and the different classes’ differential relations to those practices’ (1990: 188), and ‘the vicious circles of thematic analysis’ (1990: 189), which lead only to ‘commonplaces’ (1990: 189). Their position is that if research is not informed by a thoroughly worked-out theoretical framework for the analysis of social data, and a theory of class relations and the way that relates to social systems, then it is condemned to making guesses that can only be based on a nonscientific understanding of the evidence. This is an argument and position to which, many years later, Bourdieu returns in the most methodologically complex and reflexive of his empirical studies, The Weight of the World (1999):

In fact, it is precisely by leaving things alone, abstaining from any intervention and all construction that one falls into error: the terrain is then free for preconstructions or for the automatic effects of social mechanisms at work in even the most elementary scientific operations (conception and formulation of questions, definitions of categories for coding, etc.). Only active denunciation of the tacit presuppositions of common sense can counter the effects of all the representations of social reality to which both interviewers and interviewees are continually exposed. (1999: 620)

Conclusion

Bourdieu’s sociology of education period overlaps with his development and refinement of a theory of the relationship between regimes of cultural distinction and class formation. At the same time as he was developing his theory of educational reproduction, he was analysing various forms of cultural consumption—as demonstrated in Photography (Bourdieu et al. 1990, first French publication 1965) and The Love of Art (Bourdieu, Darbel & Schnapper 1990, first French publication 1966)—within the wider theoretical context of processes of symbolic power and domination, culminating in the lengthy empirical study that was Distinction (1989). In the next chapter, we will provide an account of this stage of Bourdieu’s work, focusing on the relationship between the culture, symbolic power, and the production and reproduction of class formations.