Classics with Commentary

Pierre Bourdieu: Contemporary Education Dialogue

13(2) 1–20
The Sociologist © 2016 Education Dialogue Trust
SAGE Publications
of Education sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0973184916640406
http://ced.sagepub.com

Jyoti Dalal1

Pierre Bourdieu had modest, peasant roots. He was born in 1930, in a

rural family in the Béarn province of south-western France. He was the
first one in his family to finish high school. His father, the son of a
sharecropper, was a postal worker. Bourdieu, being a ‘scholarship
boy’,1 made his way to the elite École Normale Supérieure. Here,
alongside Louis Althusser, he studied philosophy, which was the most
esteemed course in post-war French society. While starting his career
as a philosopher, his fieldwork in Algeria, and later in his native region
Béarn, became his ‘conversion points’, as he moved away from phi-
losophy to anthropology and sociology.2 Rising through the ranks of
academia in France, he built his own strong research centre and occu-
pied the prestigious Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France, Paris.
His career trajectory was extraordinary considering the tight, hierarchical
and centralised nature of French society, where children from privi-
leged backgrounds are trained from an early age for entry into the elite
institutions of higher education.
His own disadvantaged background led him naturally to champion
the rights of the downtrodden. Showing repugnance towards the ‘bour-
geoisie intellectuals’ who remained aloof and distanced from the minutiae
of everyday life, Bourdieu writes, ‘The intellectual world, which believes
itself so profoundly liberated from conformity and convention, has
always seemed to me as inhabited by profound conformities, that acted

1
Assistant Professor, Department of Elementary Education, Institute of Home Economics
(University of Delhi), New Delhi, India.

Corresponding author:
Jyoti Dalal, Department of Elementary Education, Institute of Home Economics (University of
Delhi), F4, Hauz Khas Enclave, New Delhi, Delhi, India-110016.
E-mail: [email protected]

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2 Contemporary Education Dialogue 13(2)

upon me as repulsive forces’ (Bourdieu quoted in Reed-Danahay, 2005,

p. 1). In the years preceding his death in 2002, Bourdieu was an intense
political activist and an unabashed critic of neoliberalism and the glo-
balisation policies of the French state. While his obituaries highlight
these last years of his life as a public intellectual, these features were
consistent throughout his life (Wacquant, 2002).
A theory of power is an important feature in Bourdieu’s discussions of
inequities in society, which he examined primarily through education.
He unmasked the totalising nature of the state—made possible through
education—as violence, which ‘is not exercised solely upon the subaltern,
the mad, the sick and the criminal. It bears upon us all, in a myriad
minute and invisible ways, every time we perceive and construct the
social world through categories instilled in us via our education’
(Wacquant, 1996[1989], p. xviii, italics in original). The modern capitalist
state through education has a monopoly over legitimate symbolic
violence,3 which is the ‘subtle imposition of systems of meaning’
(Wacquant, 2008, p. 264) of the dominant group on the dominated
groups, thereby legitimising and solidifying structures of inequality. The
school today does what the church did in feudal society, that is, justifying
and legitimising the rule of the dominant by consecrating and sanctifying
social divisions. Hence, it is ‘not the army, the asylum, the hospital, and
the jail, but the school [that] is the state’s most potent conduit and servant’
(Wacquant, 1996[1989], p. xviii).
Before examining Bourdieu’s educational analysis woven around
habitus, capital and field, it is important to understand the backdrop
against which these concepts evolved. Bourdieu himself was uncom-
fortable with texts being read out of their context. This situatedness
becomes essential while reading Bourdieu whose thoughts enjoy
unmatched popularity in France, but outside Europe, they remain vul-
nerable to misinterpretation. His stylistically complex and terse writings,
originally published in French, have made him inaccessible to non-
French-speaking scholars, who, because of being compelled to rely on
translated texts miss out on the actual intent of his writings as well as
their historical specificity. Moreover, Bourdieu did not respect the
orthodox disciplinary boundaries of the social sciences, and developed
his own ideas and constructs over the course of a long career, presented
in his voluminous interdisciplinary writings. This puts the onus on
scholars to shed their disciplinary complacency and venture into an
exploration of other disciplines. Unable to capture the significance of
Bourdieu’s entire body of works, scholars choose to read his texts selec-
tively, appropriating his ideas in a fragmented and piecemeal fashion,

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Dalal 3

and obfuscating the systematic and unified conceptual progression that

is characteristic of his eclectic writings. For instance, scholars in educa-
tion quote profusely from Reproduction in Education, Society, and
Culture (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977[1970]) (henceforth Reproduction),
co-authored with Passeron, ignoring the conception of action expounded
in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu, 1977[1972]). Similarly,
anthropologists, too, refer liberally to the latter and to Bourdieu’s
ethnographies of Algeria, while overlooking his analyses of schooling
processes and of intellectuals and class relations, which are founda-
tional to his anthropological arguments. Hence, ‘each group of inter-
preters typically ignores the others, so that few have discerned the
organic connections, . . . that link Bourdieu’s wide-ranging inquiries’
(Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 5).

Theorising Practice: Habitus, Capital and Field

Bourdieu’s intellectual rigour is displayed in more than 35 books and
350 articles that he published over the course of his career. Through his
voluminous writings and lucid lectures, he made key contributions to the
study of diverse fields like education, art, science, language, religion,
law, media studies, history, philosophy, literary studies, kinship and
marriage. His penetrating and critical analyses, cutting across artificial
disciplinary boundaries, shaped the social sciences in the twentieth
century.4 Understanding the significance of Bourdieu’s vast influence
necessitates an understanding of French academic discourse within
which his work evolved.
The post-war period in French academic discourse was dominated by
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology.
If structuralism emphasises rules, models and structures, while sidelining
individuals’ ‘primary experience of the familiar world’ (Bourdieu,
1990[1980], p. 26), phenomenology focuses on the experiential meaning,
ignoring the objective nature of individuals’ actions, hopes and subjec-
tive experiences. Bourdieu’s sociology was in response to these estab-
lished paradigms, as he found both of them unsuccessful in making sense
of the practical dimensions of everyday life. Divided between the larger
debates of individual and society, the social sciences missed out on
understanding the social reality that consists of both objective structures
and subjective meaning. Bourdieu writes, ‘Of all the oppositions that
artificially divide social science, the most fundamental, and the most

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4 Contemporary Education Dialogue 13(2)

ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism’

(ibid., p. 25). Despite the early influence of structuralism and phenome-
nology on him, instead of claiming a position within this binary, he dis-
puted both of them, embarking on his life-long project of developing a
theory of practice. Early in his career, he realised that such a theory was
possible only when these dualities were reconciled, as ‘objectivism and
subjectivism, mechanicalism and finalism, structural necessity and indi-
vidual agency are false antinomies . . . all collude in obfuscating the
anthropological truth of human practice’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992,
p. 10). His conceptual and methodological constructs of habitus, capital
and field revolutionised the then dominant conceptualisation of theory,
practice and method by transcending the dualism of structure and agency,
of objectivism and subjectivism. Positing them as ‘thinking tools’, he
kept the meaning of these terms loose, as he wanted scholars to further
use them in their work. This section will now present a summary of these
constructs and their interrelatedness with each other.
Habitus is a set of acquired dispositions (Wacquant, 2009) that is
expressed through durable ways ‘of standing, speaking, walking, and
thereby of feeling and thinking’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 70). Shaping even
seemingly natural instinctive responses, it refers to the partly uncon-
scious ‘taking in’ of rules, values and dispositions (Webb, Schirato, &
Danaher, 2002). It ‘is necessity internalized and connected into a dispo-
sition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions
. . . ’ (Bourdieu, 1984[1979], p. 70). Being socialised subjectivity, habitus
is social in the individual (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), shaping the
person’s attitudes, mental schemata, thought processes, emotions and
deportment. Hence, habitus has cognitive, affective and corporeal facets
to it.
Habitus indicates how it is not just the body that is in the social world,
but it is also the social world that is in the body (ibid.). When habitus
encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a ‘fish in
water’ that does not feel the weight of the water, and takes the world
around itself for granted. Bourdieu quotes Pascal: ‘The world encom-
passes me but I comprehend it precisely because it comprises me. It is
because this world has produced me, because it has produced the catego-
ries of thoughts that I apply to it, that it appears to me as self-evident’
(ibid., p. 128, italics in original).
While being the ‘social inscribed in the body of the biological indi-
vidual’ (Bourdieu cited in Lamaison, 1986, p. 113), habitus is also ‘crea-
tive, inventive, but within the limits of its structures . . . ’ (Bourdieu &

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Dalal 5

Wacquant, 1992, p. 19). This in situ approach dismisses the free will
expounded by phenomenology that bestows choice and agency on indi-
viduals, holding them responsible for their actions and destiny.
Repudiating the notion of individuals as free-floating beings, Bourdieu
argued that choice operates vis-à-vis the social world, as social agents
have ‘internalized . . . the objective chances they face. They know how
to “read” the future that fits them, which is made for them and for which
they are made’ (ibid., p. 130). ‘This internalization of objective chances
in the form of subjective hopes and mental schemata’ (ibid., fn. 84)
alludes to the agency exercised by individuals, which is manifested either
through their submission or resistance.
Indicating how habitus responds to the field, Bourdieu ‘explodes
the vacuous notion of “society” and replaces it with those of field and
social space’ (ibid., p. 16). A differentiated society is not a seamless
totality, but an ensemble of relatively autonomous spheres of ‘play’,
which he termed as fields, that give cues and impart logic to an indi-
vidual. How social agents respond and act in the field might be strange
for an ethnographer; being a product of the field, it is never so for the
native. Bourdieu points out how people are not fools, and notes that
they are not as bizarre as we would want them to be. Habitus dismisses
binary thinking, and instead accounts for the actual logic of practice by
escaping from the ‘philosophy of the subject without doing away with
the agent, as well as from (under) the philosophy of the structure but
without forgetting to take into account the effects it wields upon and
through the agent’ (ibid., pp. 121–122).
Bourdieu examines power through the concept of capital, which
‘functions both as a weapon and as a stake of struggle, that which allows
its possessors to wield a power, an influence, and then to exist, in the
field’ (ibid., p. 98, italics in original). The three types of capital are eco-
nomic capital, cultural capital and social capital. Economic capital refers
to material wealth and resources, such as cash and assets which can be
converted into the social and cultural aspects of capital. Cultural capital
refers to linguistic skills, education, forms of knowledge and the posses-
sion of specific artefacts like books. Social capital alludes to social rela-
tionships and networks based on membership of certain groups. Capital
exists and functions only in relation to a field, conferring power over the
field, through its distribution in the field. The field is hierarchical as
social agents occupy dominant and subordinate positions in the field
depending on the capital they possess. In other words, the field denotes
the social arena in which power struggles and conflicts take place ‘as

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6 Contemporary Education Dialogue 13(2)

specific kinds of capital are at stake and certain forms of habitus or dis-
positions are fitted for success’ (Gaventa, 2003, p. 9). How social agents
perceive the field and how they choose strategies for deployment in the
field are relative to their positioning, owing to the differential spread of
capital (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).
Bourdieu translates the relational and interdependent nature of these
concepts in terms of a formula: (habitus) (capital) + field = practice
(Bourdieu, 1984[1979], p. 101) that conceives of social practice in terms
of the relationship between habitus and capital as realised within the
specific logic of a given field.5 Put together, these three concepts show
the ‘practical logic’ of individuals in their everyday lives. Although cri-
tiqued for being abstract, they get concretised in his educational analysis
where he employs them to demonstrate the functioning of power.

Education and Reproduction

Although Bourdieu addressed a range of themes and topics, his writings
were mostly concerned with the sociology of education. He was prima-
rily a sociologist of education, which, according to him, was yet to
receive its due respect and recognition in the social sciences. ‘Far from
being the kind of applied, and hence inferior, science (only suitable for
educationalists) that has ordinarily been the view of it, the sociology of
education lies at the foundation of a general anthropology of power and
legitimacy’ (Bourdieu, 1996[1989], p. 5). Education facilitates the
examination of what to him is the central problem of sociology—how
through the processes of misrecognition, domination persists and repro-
duces itself in society. Akin to the Marxian notion of false conscious-
ness (Gaventa, 2003), misrecognition refers to the failure of the
dominated in consciously recognising the processes of domination, and
thereby complicity participating in their own submission. Education
plays a consequential role in granting legitimacy to the arbitrary powers
of the ruling section. Burying ‘the myth of the “school as liberating
force,” . . . in order to perceive the educational institution in the true
light of its social uses, that is, as one of the foundations of domination
and of the legitimation of domination’ (Bourdieu, 1996[1989], p. 5),6
his educational analysis demonstrate the class-based nature of the
French system of education. Class analysis,7 while being at the centre of
all his analysis, in the context of examining educational structures and
processes become foundational also in the context of examining power
in any modern, stratified society.

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Dalal 7

The roots of Bourdieu’s interest in education, social class and power

can be traced to his own life. Given his humble beginnings, Bourdieu
had a very close experience of the non-egalitarian and centralised nature
of French education. Born and brought up in a remote village in the
Pyrenees Mountains, he was culturally as well as geographically dis-
tanced from the institutions of learning, which were all located in Paris.
During his childhood, that is, in the 1930s and the mid-1940s, the education
system in France followed a rigid tracking system, and had two kinds of
primary schools—schools for working and rural class children provided
schooling only till the primary level, while schools for the children of the
elites opened up possibilities of secondary and higher education. Until
the 1980s, the two-tiered system continued in middle school; one tier
prepared students for technical training and the other tier oriented them
to elite education. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, these dif-
ferentiating structures were abolished at the primary and middle levels,
but a certain kind of subtle stratification continues at the higher levels
even today (Reed-Danahay, 2005). Bourdieu’s educational analysis orig-
inates from, and draws on, this tight, hierarchical and highly stratified
French education system.
By deploying the constructs of habitus and capital in the educational
field, Bourdieu examines how curricular and pedagogic practices of
schooling work to reproduce class inequalities. Owing to the primary
socialisation that occurs in the family, children from different class back-
grounds enter school with varying degrees of cultural capital and the
corresponding primary habitus. The school is not a culturally neutral
zone, as it embodies the culture of the dominant group, endorsing it as
legitimate and naturally given. Cultural capital functions as an effective
filter in reproducing inequality in society (Bourdieu, 1973), as it favours
the primary habitus and the cultural capital of the dominant section,
while perceiving those of the dominated as a deficit or failure in the child
or in the home. Even the school curriculum acknowledges and rewards
the cultural capital of the dominant classes, while systematically devalu-
ing that of the lower classes. The school, being responsible for inculcat-
ing the secondary habitus, actually privileges and legitimises the cultural
capital of the dominant section by giving them high marks, awards and
honours, thereby authenticating their knowledge, culture and skills. By
being in consonance with their cultural capital, the school becomes an
extension of their family. Thus, acquiring the secondary habitus of the
school becomes a natural and smooth process for the children of the
dominant class. On the other hand, children from the dominated sec-
tion find this shift difficult, artificial and alienating, and thus resort to

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8 Contemporary Education Dialogue 13(2)

submission or resistance as they try to reconcile themselves to the dif-

ferent and alien world of schooling. By turning objective truths into
subjective hopes, children internalise their own failure, blaming them-
selves for it. Anticipating their own failure, children ‘choose’ to do
poorly at school or even to drop out from the system (Bourdieu &
Passeron, 1977[1970]).
Bourdieu’s work lays bare the relationship between education and
reproduction by examining the degree of congruence between the culture
prevailing in their home and milieu with the culture prevailing in the
school (Dalal, 2013). Bourdieu’s analogy of ‘fish in water’ (Bourdieu &
Wacquant, 1992, p. 127) is evoked by sociologists of education to cap-
ture the continuity faced by the children of the dominant section between
their home and their school. In contrast, for children from other class
backgrounds, the school is a hostile environment—a cultural and social
world set apart from that of their families and communities, making them
feel out of place, or, in other words, like ‘fish out of water’. Schooling
means the continued dominance of the group whose habitus and cultural
capital are embodied in the school and in the curriculum. Hence, for
Bourdieu, the school itself perpetuates and reinforces the initial class
inequalities. The school exercises a symbolic violence on the dominated
because the school curricula, examination system and pedagogic practices
reflect and reinforce the ideology of the dominant groups. Hence, the
school becomes a space of ‘ideological production which contributes to
the reproduction of inequalities in society whilst simultaneously con-
cealing its own role in processes of social reproduction by masquerading
as neutral and universal’ (Gewirtz & Cribb, 2009, p. 114).
The three important texts that present Bourdieu’s educational theory
based on an analysis of the relationship between class and schooling
are The State Nobility (Bourdieu, 1996[1989]), The Inheritors (Bourdieu
& Passeron, 1979[1964]) and Reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron,
1977[1970]). Two of these texts, The Inheritors and Reproduction, along
with several other articles, were written in collaboration with Jean-
Claude Passeron. These writings criticised the role of the French educa-
tional system in reproducing the class interests of the dominant section,
and helped fuel student dissatisfaction which burst forth in May 1968 in
France.8 Reproduction is one of the early and foundational texts that
devised a theory of ‘symbolic violence’. Notable for its originality and
breadth, the analysis in this text ‘is not confined to an examination of the
social selection of students at different levels of the educational systems,
nor to a discussion of class differences in linguistic codes, but observes
closely the actual process of pedagogic action’ (Bottomore, 1977[1970],

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Dalal 9

p. xvi). It is divided into two parts, theoretical and empirical, the inter-
connected nature of which is pointed out by the authors right at the
beginning of the book. The excerpts in the next section are from Part II
of the book, which analyses the educational system in France, but which
also has the potential to examine any stratified education system.
Bourdieu’s writings impacted the ‘scholarly and policy debate on the
school system and established him as the progenitor of “reproduction
theory”’ (Wacquant, 2008, p. 262). They were foremost in shaping the
new sociology of education which was established in the early 1960s and
the late 1970s,9 distancing itself from the earlier structural-functionalist
approach, which was primarily concerned with the issues of access in
formal education. Instead of accepting the given body of knowledge, the
new paradigm problematised the content and transmission of knowledge
and curriculum to establish its linkages with the reproduction of social
inequality. Bourdieu’s analysis is noteworthy for painstakingly combin-
ing statistical methods with the ethnographic approach and for bringing
the micro processes of school and classroom from their earlier peripheral
position to the centre. Thus, he played a crucial role in further establishing
the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of curriculum.
Bourdieu’s writings, while treated as foundational in the sociology of
education, are largely misunderstood, as his theoretical formulations are
seen as heavily deterministic with no scope for change, agency and
resistance on the part of the subject. Critics reading him in a splintered
manner, ironically, charge him with holding the kind of objectivist, struc-
turalist position that he had discarded and sought to overcome in the
course of his career (Wacquant, 1989).10 Replying to this charge in a
dialogue, Bourdieu states, ‘I must say that I find many of these criticisms
strikingly superficial; they reveal that those who make them may have
paid more attention to the titles of my books (most blatantly in the case
of Reproduction) than to the actual analysis they contain’ (ibid., p. 36).
As indicated earlier, since Bourdieu kept on refining his ideas and theo-
ries, in response to the historical development of his own context, it is
important to examine his entire enterprise and not confine his work to
individual concepts and theories. Scholars of education, because of their
over-reliance on Bourdieu’s Reproduction, miss the organic connections
with his other writings, both within the field of education as well as with
other disciplines. Such criticism has also been levelled against him after
the publication of Willis’ (1977) Learning to Labour.11 Scholars, given
their tendency to classify theorists into neat categories, often identify
Willis with the resistance frame, while reducing Bourdieu to the repro-
ductionist frame. Such categorisation remains erroneous, as the presence

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10 Contemporary Education Dialogue 13(2)

of resistance is evident in Bourdieu’s discussions on domination as well.

He writes, ‘I do not see how relations of domination, whether material or
symbolic, could possibly operate without implying, activating resist-
ance’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 80). Endowing the dominated
with agency, Bourdieu quotes, ‘The dominated, in any social universe,
can always exert a certain force, inasmuch as belonging to a field means
by definition that one is capable of producing effects in it.’ (ibid., italics
in original) For Bourdieu, knowledge of the vicious reproductive cycle
of domination inherent in the social world is necessary to break free from
its exploitation.

Knowledge of the social world and, more precisely, the categories that make
it possible, are the stakes, par excellence, of political struggle, the inextrica-
bly theoretical and practical struggle for the power to conserve or transform
the social world by conserving or transforming the categories through which
it is perceived. (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 729)

Through his project of theorising practice, he primarily wanted to

uncover the processes of misrecognition which make active resistance
almost unthinkable. After all, Bourdieu firmly believed that for any kind
of social change to be possible, the dominated needs to have knowledge
of the social world and of the domination inherent in it.
From Bourdieu and Passeron, (1977[1970]).
…Indeed, one begins to suspect that the functions of the examination
are not reducible to the services it performs for the institution, still less
to the satisfactions it give the teaching staff, as soon as one observes that
most of those excluded from studying at the various levels of education
eliminate themselves before being examined, and that the proportion of
those whose elimination is thus masked by the selection overtly carried
out differs according to social class. In every country, the inequalities
between the classes are incomparably greater when measured by the
probabilities of candidature (calculated on the basis of the proportion of
children in each social class who reach a given educational level after
equivalent previous achievement) than when measured by the probabili-
ties of passing. Thus, previous performances being equal, pupils of
working-class origin are more likely to ‘eliminate themselves’ from sec-
ondary education by declining to enter it than to eliminate themselves
once they have entered, and a fortiori more likely not to enter than to be
eliminated from it by the explicit sanction of examination failure.
Moreover, those who do not eliminate themselves at the moment of mov-
ing from one stage to another are more likely to enter those branches

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Dalal 11

(establishments or sections) from which there is least chance of entering

the next level of education; so that when the examination seems to elimi-
nate them, it most often merely ratifies that other form of advance self-
elimination which relegation to a second-order branch, a deferred
elimination, in fact amounts to.
The opposition between the ‘passed’ and the ‘failed’ is the source of a
false perspective on the educational system as a selecting agency. Based
on a candidate’s experience (actual or potential, direct or mediate, past or
present), this opposition between the two sub-sets separated by selection
in the examination from within the set of candidates hides the relation
between this set and its complement (i.e., the set of non-candidates),
thereby ruling out any inquiry into the hidden criteria of the election of
those from whom the examination ostensibly makes its selection. A good
deal of research on the educational system as an agency of continuous
selection (drop-out) simply takes over this opposition from spontaneous
sociology when it takes for its object the relation between those entering
a stage of schooling and those successfully completing it, neglecting to
examine the relation between those who leave one stage and those who
enter the next one. To apprehend the latter relation it is sufficient look at
the whole process of selection from the point of view which, if the sys-
tem did not impose its own point of view on them, would be that of the
social classes condemned to immediate or deferred self-elimination.
What makes this reversal of the problematic difficult is that it requires
something more and other than a simple logical conversion: if the ques-
tion of examination failure rates holds the limelight (consider the reac-
tions to a change in the baccalaureate pass rate), it does so because those
who have the means to pose this question belong to the social classes for
whom the risk of elimination can only come from the examination. …
…It is clear why, 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, which it undertakes and con-
ducts with formal irreproachability, conceals the performance of the
function of the school system by masking, behind the opposition between
the passed and the failed, the relation between the candidates and those
whom the system has de facto excluded from the ranks of the candidates,
and so concealing the links between the school system and the structure
of class relations. Like the spontaneous sociology which understands the
system as the system asks to be understood, a number of would-be scien-
tific analyses, which allow the same autonomization to be foisted upon
them and adopt the very logic of the examination, consider only those

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12 Contemporary Education Dialogue 13(2)

who are in the system at a given moment, excluding those who have been
excluded from it. But the relationship of each of each of those remaining
in the system to his whole social class of origin dominates and informs
his relationship to the system: his behavior, aptitudes, and dispositions
towards school bear the stamp of his whole academic past, because they
owe their characteristics to the degree of probability or improbability of
his still being within the system, at that stage and in that branch. …
…‘Attitudes’ such as bourgeois students’ dilettantism, self-assurance
and irreverent ease, or working-class students’ tense application and
educational realism can only be understood as a function of the prob-
ability or improbability of occupying the position occupied which
defines the objective structure of the subjective experience of the ‘wonder
boy’ or the ‘inheritor’. In short, what offers itself to be grasped, at
every point on the curve, is the slope of the curve; in other words, the
whole curve. If it is true that the relation an individual maintains with
the School and with the culture it transmits is more or less ‘effortless’,
‘brilliant’, ‘natural’, ‘laboured’, ‘tense’ or ‘dramatic’, according to the
probability of his survival in the system, and if it is also the case that in
their verdicts the School and ‘society’ take as much account of the rela-
tion to culture as of culture, then it is clear how much remains unintel-
ligible until one goes to the principle underlying the production of the
most durable academic and social differences, the habitus – the generative,
unifying principle of conducts and opinions which is also their explan-
atory principle, since at every moment of an educational or intellectual
biography it tends to reproduce the system of objective conditions of
which it is the product. …
…Nothing is better designed than the examination to inspire univer-
sal recognition of the legitimacy of academic verdicts and of the social
hierarchies they legitimate, since it leads the self-eliminated to count
themselves among those who fail, while enabling those elected from
among a small number of eligible candidates to see in their election the
proof of a merit or ‘gift’ which would have caused them to be preferred
to all comers in any circumstances. Only when the examination is seen
to have the function of concealing the elimination which takes place
without examination, can it be fully understood why so many features of
its operation as an overt selecting procedure still obey the logic governing
the elimination which it conceals.
When one knows how much examiners’ judgments owe to implicit
norms which retranslate and specify the values of the dominant classes
in terms of the logic proper to the educational system, it is clear that
candidates are handicapped in proportion to the distance between these

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Dalal 13

values and those of their class of origin. Class bias is strongest in those
tests which throw the examiner onto the implicit, diffuse criteria of
the traditional art of grading, such as the dissertation or the oral, an occa-
sion for passing total judgments, armed with the unconscious criteria of
social perception on total persons, whose moral and intellectual qualities
are grasped through the infinitesimals of style or manners, accent or elo-
cution, posture or mimicry, even clothing and cosmetics. …
…Thus it may be that an educational system is more capable of con-
cealing its social function of legitimating class differences behind its
technical function of producing qualifications, the less able it is to ignore
the incompressible demands of the labor market. Doubtless modern soci-
eties are more and more successful in getting the School to produce, and
guarantee as such, more and more skilled individuals, i.e. agents better
and better qualified for the demands of the economy; but this restriction
of the autonomy imparted to the educational system is no doubt more
apparent than real, insofar as the raising of the minimum level of techni-
cal qualification required for occupational purpose does not, ipso facto,
entail a reduction of the gap between the technical qualification guaran-
teed by the examination and the social quality which it bestows by what
might be called its certification effect....
If every selecting operation always has the indissolubly two-fold
effect of regulating technical qualifications by reference to the demands
of the labour market and of creating social grades by reference to the
structure of class relations which the educational system helps to per-
petuate, if, in short, the School has both a technical function of producing
and attesting capacities and a social function of conserving power and
privileges, it can be seen that modern societies furnish the educational
system with vastly increased opportunities to exercise its power of trans-
muting social advantages into academic advantages, themselves con-
vertible into social advantages, because they allow it to present academic,
hence implicitly social, requirements as technical prerequisites for the
exercise of an occupation….
…In ever more completely delegating the power of selection to the
academic institution, the privileged classes are able to appear to be sur-
rendering to a perfectly neutral authority the power of transmitting power
from one generation to another, and thus to be renouncing the arbitrary
privilege of the hereditary transmission of privileges. But through its
formally irreproachable verdicts, which always objectively serve the dom-
inant classes since they never sacrifice the technical interests of those
classes except to the advantage of their social interests, the School is better
able than ever, at all events in the only way conceivable in a society

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14 Contemporary Education Dialogue 13(2)

wedded to democratic ideologies, to contribute to the reproduction of the

established order, since it succeeds better than ever in concealing the func-
tion it performs. The mobility of individuals, far from being incompatible
with reproduction of the structure of class relations, can help to conserve
that structure, by guaranteeing social stability through the controlled selec-
tion of a limited number of individuals – modified in and for individual
upgrading – and so giving credibility to the ideology of social mobility
whose most accomplished expression is the school ideology of “l’Ecole
liberatrice”, the school as a liberating force….
…Never before has the question of the ‘aims’ of education been so
completely identified with discussion of the contribution education
makes to national growth. Even the preoccupations apparently most for-
eign to this logic, such as the ostentatious concern to ‘democratize edu-
cational and cultural opportunity’ increasingly draw on the language of
economic rationality, taking the form, for example, of denunciation of
the ‘wastage’ of talent. But are economic ‘rationalization’ and ‘democ-
ratization’ so automatically linked as well-intentioned technocrats like
to think? The sociology and economics of education would not be so
easily trapped in such a problematic if they did not dismiss the question
that is objectively posed by all artificalist inquiries into the ‘aims’ of
education, namely the theoretical question of the functions of the educa-
tional system that are objectively possible (i.e. not only logically but also
socio-logically) and the correlated methodological question of the com-
parability of educational systems and their products.
The technocratic thinking which, reviving the philosophy of history
of social evolutionism in its simplest form, claims to extract from reality
itself a unilinear, one-dimensional model of the phases of historical
change, obtains without much effort the yardstick of a universal com-
parison which enables it to hierarchize the different societies or educa-
tional systems univocally, according to their degree of development or
‘rationality’. In reality, because the indicators of the ‘rationality’ of an
educational system are less amenable to comparative interpretation the
more completely they express the historical and social specificity of edu-
cational institutions and practices, this procedure destroys the very object
of comparison by divesting the elements compared of all they owe to
their membership in systems of relations. Consequently, whether one
confines oneself to indicators as abstract as illiteracy rate, enrolment rate
and teacher-pupil ratio, or takes into account more specific indicators of
the efficiency of the educational system or of the degree to which it
makes use of the intellectual resources potentially available, such as the
role of technical education, the proportion of student intake successfully

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Dalal 15

graduating, or the differential representation of the sexes or social classes

in the different levels of education, it is necessary to reinstate these rela-
tions within the systems of relations on which they depend, in order to
avoid comparing the incomparable or, more subtly, failing to compare
the really comparable.
More profoundly, all these indicators rest on an implicit definition of
the ‘productivity’ of the educational system which, in referring exclu-
sively to its formal, external rationality, reduces the system of its func-
tions to one of them, itself subjected to a reductive abstraction.
Technocratic measurement of educational output assumes the impover-
ished model of a system which, knowing no other goals than those it
derives from the economic system, responds optimally, in quantity and
quality, and at minimum cost, to the technical demand for training, i.e.
the needs of the labour market. For anyone who accepted such a defini-
tion of rationality, the (formally) most rational educational system would
be one which, totally subordinating itself to the requirement of the calcu-
lability and predictability, produced at the lowest cost specific skills
directly adjusted to specialized tasks and guaranteed the types and levels
of skill required for a given dateline by the economic system, using to
this end personnel specially trained in handling the most adequate peda-
gogic techniques, setting aside class and sex divisions so as to draw as
widely as possible (without stepping outside the limits of profitability)
on the intellectual ‘reserves’ and banishing all vestiges of traditionalism
so as to substitute for an education in culture, designed to form men of
taste, an education capable of producing made-to-measure specialists
according to schedule….
…If, in the particular case of the relationship between the School and
the social classes, the harmony appears to be perfect, this is because the
objective structures produce class habitus and in particular the disposi-
tions and predispositions which, in generating practices adapted to these
structures, enable the structures to function and be perpetuated: for exam-
ple, the disposition to make use of the School and the predispositions to
succeed in it depend, as we have seen, on the objective chances of using
it and succeeding in it that are attached to the different social classes,
these disposition and predispositions in turn constituting one of the most
important factors in the perpetuation of the structure of educational
chances as an objectively graspable manifestation of the relationship
between the educational system and the structure of class relations. Even
the negative dispositions and predispositions leading to self-elimination,
such as, for example, self-depreciation, devalorization of the School and
its sanctions or resigned expectation of failure or exclusion may be

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16 Contemporary Education Dialogue 13(2)

understood as unconscious anticipation of the sanctions the School objec-

tively has in store for the dominated classes. More profoundly, only an
adequate theory of the habitus, as the site of the internalization of
externality and the externalization of internality, can fully bring to light
the social conditions of performance of the function of the legitimating
the social order, doubtless the best concealed of all the functions of the
School. Because the traditional system of education manages to present
the illusion that its action of inculcation is entirely responsible for produc-
ing the cultivated habitus, or, by an apparent contradiction, that it owes its
differential efficacy exclusively to the innate abilities of those who
undergo it, and that it is therefore independent of class determinations –
whereas it tends towards the limit of merely confirming and strengthen-
ing a class habitus which, constituted outside the School, is the basis of all
scholastic acquirements – it contributes irreplaceably towards perpetuat-
ing the structure of class relations and, simultaneously, legitimating it, by
concealing the fact that the scholastic hierarchies it produces reproduce
social hierarchies. To be persuaded that everything predisposes a tradi-
tional educational system to serve a function of social conservation, one
only has to recall, among other things, the affinity between the culture it
inculcates, its manner of inculcating it and the manner of possessing it
which this mode of acquisition presupposes and produces, and between
this set of features and the social characteristics of the public in whom it
inculcates this culture, these characteristics themselves being interde-
pendent with the pedagogic and cultural dispositions the inculcating
agents derive from their social origin, training, position in the institution
and class membership. Given the complexity of the network of relations
through which the function of legitimating the social order is accom-
plished, it would clearly be vain to claim to localize its performance in
one mechanism or one sector of the educational system. However, in a
class society in which the School shares the task of reproducing that prod-
uct of history which constitutes at a given moment the legitimate model
of the cultivated disposition with families unequally endowed with cul-
tural capital and the disposition to make use of it, nothing better serves the
pedagogic interests of the dominant classes than the pedagogic ‘laissez-
faire’ characteristic of traditional teaching, since this action by default,
immediately efficacious and, by definition, ungraspable, seems predes-
tined to serve the function of legitimating the social order.
It is clear how naive it would be to reduce all the functions of the
educational system to the function of political or religious indoctrination
which can itself be carried on with varying degrees of latency, depending
on the mode of inculcation. This confusion, inherent in most analyses of

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Dalal 17

the political function of the School, is all the more pernicious in that the
ostentatious refusal of the function of indoctrination or, at least, of the
most overt forms of political propaganda and ‘civic instruction’ can in
turn fulfil an ideological function in concealing the function of legitima-
tion of the social order….
…Thus, the most hidden and most specific function of the educational
system consists in hiding its objective function, that is, masking the objec-
tive truth of its relationship to the structure of class relations….
…Thus, in a society in which the obtaining of social privileges
depends more and more closely on possession of academic credentials,
the School does not only have the function of ensuring discreet succes-
sion to a bourgeois estate which can no longer be transmitted directly
and openly. This privileged instrument of the bourgeois sociodicy which
confers on the privileged the supreme privilege of not seeing themselves
as privileged manages the more easily to convince the disinherited that
they owe their scholastic and social destiny to their lack of gifts or mer-
its, because in matters of culture absolute dispossession excludes aware-
ness of being dispossessed.

Notes
1. The terms, used by Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), refer to ‘the working-
class child who succeeds “against all the odds”’ (p. 175, fn. 34).
2. Alluding to Bourdieu’s military assignment in Algeria that led to the
production of his first ethnographic work, Wacquant (2002) writes:

The encounter with the Algerian war was decisive. It led him away from
philosophy, away from the self-enclosed world of the mind, to sociology
as a discipline that is fully engaged in empirical research. It required
systematic involvement with the world—counting and observing, doing
interviews—rather than flying above it, as philosophers do.

3. Bourdieu and Passeron (1977[1970], p. xxi) points to ‘the homology

between the school system’s monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence and
the State’s monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence’.
4. See Calhoun, LiPuma and Postone (1995), Robbins (1991) and Harker,
Maher and Wilkes (1990) for a discussion on Bourdieu’s sociology.
5. This formula, developed and presented in Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984[1979]),
alludes to class habitus. Bourdieu’s work is primarily concerned with class
habitus, as he demonstrates the ‘ways in which the classed body, classed
knowledge and class experience, all work together to create a class habitus
that favours those dominant groups with “appropriate” economic, social and
cultural capital’ (Au & Apple, 2009, p. 91).

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18 Contemporary Education Dialogue 13(2)

6. Bourdieu (1996[1989]) points out that the ideology of the ‘“liberating school”
is the new opiate of [the] people’ (p. 412, fn. 3) in the modern, rational state.
7. He reconceptualised class in ‘complex ways’ (Au & Apple, 2009, p. 91) by
going beyond and fusing the economic class determinism of Marx ‘with the
Weberian recognition of the distinctiveness of the cultural order and [the]
Durkheimian concern for classification’ (Wacquant, 2008, p. 270).
8. Questioning the social fabric of French society, this movement of civil
unrest began with students’ frustration over growing unemployment and
the authoritarian, stratified nature of French universities. See Swartz
(1997, pp. 65–71) for more details.
9. Along with Bourdieu, Bernstein too is associated with this new wave that
inspired a different direction in educational research. The works of Young
(1971) and of Bowles and Gintis (1976) is also significant in shaping the
new paradigm. Young’s Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the
Sociology of Education is often quoted as heralding this turn; it has two
articles by Bourdieu and one by Bernstein. The essays by Bourdieu are
‘Intellectual Field and Creative Project’ and ‘Systems of Education and
Systems of Thought’.
10. Out of all of Bourdieu’s constructs, habitus is most often critiqued for
being structuralist. Arguing against this, Thapan (1988) posits that instead
of viewing habitus as being close to the structure, dictating action to the
individual, it should rather be seen as a mediating concept between structure
and practice. The relationship between structure, habitus and practice is
dialectical, providing scope for individual will and choice, although within
the constraints of the field. Also see Harker, Maher and Wilkes (1990) for a
similar discussion.
11. This work, a classic study of the lives of working-class boys, has provoked
considerable discussion on resistance.

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