Elitist Education and Social Reproduction: The Return of Bourdieu

Two recent news items about elitism and education have come up, in France and New Zealand, raising the question of the role of education in reproducing social hierarchies and class stratification. In France, Sarkozy has called for the Elite Colleges (Grandes Ecoles) to accept quotas of students from poorer income backgrounds. The elite colleges have responded calling the quotas and attempt to lower the standards of the institutions (some of which have been around since 1800s). There was however no intention to lower entrance standards. What the quotas would have guaranteed was that the preliminary entrance exams, which are financially taxing on poorer families, would not stop poorer students without the money and family connections from having their children attend. Such preliminary entrance tests are not set up to test the students ability to enter. Those students already have A Levels (or equivalent) and would gain entrance if it was solely based on this. However, the goal of these institutions is largely to reproduce a type of anachronistic 'republican elite'.

Ironically enough this is all occurring in France where the origins of social reproduction theory was developed and demonstrated by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu argued that education systems where not neutral environments and they largely served to reproduced whatever the dominated social structure and class stratification which exists. To prove his case Bourdieu looked at French education system and found that only certain types of students were successful. Students that have the most success are those able to operate and trade their cultural and social capital within the school system which only accepts certain social and cultural capital as acceptable. If your background, culture, beliefs, philosophy about learning, doesn't align with the dominate class, then it is not able to be accommodated in the education system Bourdieu argued that those from a working class background were at a disadvantage from the start because the middle-class/upper-class sets the cultural capital needed to be successful in schooling (a very middle/upper-class institution). All the necessary discourse, culture, behaviour and attitudes the school reflects are embodied and well developed for certain classes/people and not others. Therefore society reproduces itself through education.

The French elite colleges is simply another example of this principle in operation. A similar situation has arisen in New Zealand. Where the government is paying scholarships for poorer students to attend private secondary schools. The idea that students would receive a better education at a private secondary school than a state school is very problematic. Those tax-payer funded resources should instead be spent on a public schools in desperate need of more funding. What needs to change is the barriers which hold students from lower socio-economic backgrounds and who hold different types of cultural capital a chance to participant and succeed. Hopefully at the same time challenging rigid social and class hierarchies.