Bourdieu and Education

Diane Reay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429817274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Specially selected by Diane Reay, this is a collection of innovative and thought-provoking recently published papers that 'use' Bourdieu to put theory into practice in order to understand and analyse educational problems. Bourdieu's work is renowned for its focus on inequalities and its centering of social justice.

The contributions utilise a wide range of diverse concepts in Bourdieu's theoretical 'tool-kit', and address educational inequalities across different aspects of the educational system – from higher education and parental choice of schooling, to teachers' professional development and the PE classroom. Illuminating key aspects of Bourdieu's scholarship, they reveal how good Bourdieu is 'for thinking with'; illustrate the merits of reflexivity, the move beyond binary ways of reading the social world; and demonstrate the significance of power in any analysis of education.

The chapters in this book were all originally published as articles in Taylor and Francis journals.

The Practical Importance of Bourdieu's Analyses of Higher Education

DEREK ROBBINS

ABSTRACT The paper issues a warning about interpreting any one strand of Bourdieu’s work in isolation from the other strands but, nevertheless, attempts to effect a functional disaggregation in order to explore the practical implications for contemporary higher education of the educational research undertaken by Bourdieu and his collaborators over the last 30 years. The paper proceeds to represent the main features of that research—concentrating on the three emphases which correspond historically with the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s. The account of Bourdieu’s work is, therefore, historical rather than thematic. This reflects Bourdieu’s own contention that there is a continuously reciprocal relationship between theory and practice, interpretation and implementation. It does not at all preclude the possibility that Bourdieu’s work might acquire cumulatively a relevance which is practically important in the present. By both describing and prescribing social events during the last 30 years, Bourdieu’s work—now seen as a corpus of research—has contrived to accommodate and transcend those events in such a way that it now offers a perspective on current developments which escapes the self-fulfilling character of educational research which is solely the product of present concerns and problem definitions. The paper tries to use the detachment which has been constructed in this way out of historical involvement to reflect, within Bourdieu’s conceptual framework, on some of the prevailing features of current thought and practice in higher education including, for instance, the practice of accrediting prior learning. It argues, finally, that the tendency for separate institutions to become socially homogeneous in order to present clearly differentiated corporate identities has implications for the practice of higher education research. It means that researchers must be sensitive about their own institutional position, and it also means that the sociology of education needs to be rethought. The concentration on what happens within institutions of higher education has to be set in the context of a sociology of learning which will be able to analyse the trajectories of individuals in society to assess how they use an extensive range of learning contexts to find their way through the social system.

Introduction

In a recent book of mine, The Work of Pierre Bourdieu: recognizing society (Robbins, 1991), I sought to represent in chronological sequence the full extent of Bourdieu’s researches in a number of different disciplines. The intention of that book was to lay before the reader an account of Bourdieu’s work so as to encourage people to use that work to make sense of their own situations. My claim was that “we should endeavour to apply his thinking pragmatically” (Robbins, 1991, p. 179). This was an attempt to facilitate the kind of response to the whole of Bourdieu’s work that he himself recommended to foreign readers of Homo Academicus in the preface to the English edition of that text—that it should “lay the foundations of a self-analysis” (Bourdieu, 1988, p. xv).

This paper tries to isolate those aspects of Bourdieu’s work which can be said to be about higher education. This is a problematic task because the strength of Bourdieu’s analyses of educational practices lies precisely in the fact that he refuses to remove them, as ‘pedagogy’, from their social contexts. I attempt, therefore, a functional disaggregation of Bourdieu’s work specifically so as to relate his perception of French higher education to my perception of United Kingdom higher education. I am, thereby, seeking to put my own injunction into practice, namely to apply Bourdieu’s thinking pragmatically. At the end of this double process of interpretation and application, readers are advised to explore their own responses to Bourdieu’s effort to understand the place of higher education in French society in the last 30 years.

I shall first try to represent three main emphases in Bourdieu’s educational work. For convenience, these will be suggested developmentally as characteristic of the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s. A composite picture will emerge in this process and I shall then seek to bring that composite picture of Bourdieu’s educational work into direct confrontation with some of the issues which seem to me currently to be dominating discussion, practice, and research in United Kingdom higher education.

The Work of the 1960s

The Algerian Background

Bourdieu’s first educational research has to be seen as a product of the early anthropological field-work which he had undertaken in Algeria during the War of Independence. Bourdieu was clearly a committed supporter of the Algerian struggle for liberation from the oppression of French colonialism. He saw the collapse of the social solidarity of tribes and tribesmen as they were forcibly resettled and he also saw that modernisation was ensuring that old values and traditions were no longer going to be a viable basis for the social organisation of the independent state of Algeria. He was eager that the activism against the French in Algeria should gradually express itself positively as a social and socialist revolution rather than define itself negatively as a movement of liberation.

He documented the evidence which he found of cultural dislocation precisely so as to provide the Algerians themselves with the raw materials of a self-understanding with which they might construct a nation state by constructing, as a prerequisite, a national identity. He believed that the new state consciousness would need to develop from the bottom upwards if it were to be real rather than notional. A centrally controlled educational system would be a necessary mechanism for facilitating the process of nation creation, but the control should only be operational and not substantive.

In an important passage at the end of Le Déracinement (Bourdieu, 1964a), Bourdieu makes it clear that it was his view that state education should not mean the central prescription of a curriculum which would be transmitted undifferentially to all recipients but, instead, the central organisation of a system which would use the pedagogic process as a means of securing a collaborative socialisation whereby pupils and teachers would work together to construct the new social structures by which they would be contractually bound. Bourdieu’s hope was that this kind of participatory construction of a social consensus would ensure that obligations would no more be experienced as impositions by the new Algerians than they were by the Kabyle tribesmen by whose social organisation—now destroyed—he had been so impressed. I label this as Bourdieu’s ‘Algerian vision’ of social reconstruction through education.

Les Héritiers (1964): the analysis of the problem of French higher education

Back in France in the early 1960s, Bourdieu saw that the post World War II decline of rural and regional societies had produced a disparity of values between the country and the town and between the provinces and Paris which mirrored the disparity he had seen between the values of the desert tribesmen of Algeria and those of the other immigrant casual labourers of Algiers. The difference was that the French disparities were established elements of the status quo. The disparities constituted structural inequalities in a nation state which had already been constructed over many centuries. The state education system in France which had been heavily influenced by the Durkheimian socialism of the Third Republic seemed to have become a mechanism for sustaining these structural inequalities rather than removing them. The research which Bourdieu began, mainly at the University of Lille, which led to the publication of Les Héritiers (Bourdieu, 1964b) was an attempt to expose how anti-socialist had become the French socialist system of state education.

Bourdieu knew the statistical data which demonstrated that few ‘working-class’ students entered higher education. He was philosophically or, perhaps, morally committed to the view that this exclusion from higher education could not be adequately explained in terms of the lesser intelligence or giftedness of the working class. Sociological analysis offered a more adequate explanation. He analysed the performance of students within a selection of French higher education institutions and concluded that working-class students were less successful that middle-class students because the curriculum content was biased in favour of those things with which middle-class students were already ex-curricularly familiar. As is well known, Bourdieu coined the phrase that the working-class students were poorly endowed with ‘cultural capital’.

Bourdieu’s own findings were based on the responses to questionnaires issued to students of philosophy and social science, but his colleagues confirmed the same explanation in respect of science and technology students. Bourdieu’s conclusion seemed to suggest that the working-class students were at an unfair disadvantage and that there was a conspiratorial collusion between middle-class staff and middle-class students which meant that these students received a structurally preferential treatment which was a kind of cheating. The assumption of these findings in respect of the performance of working-class students within the higher education system was that this explained the tacit exclusion or self-exclusion of working-class people from the student population.

Les Héritiers (1964): the proposed solution

Bourdieu had diagnosed the problem sociologically and had, therefore, offered an explanation which challenged the psychological thinking which had lain behind the currency of IQ testing in the previous decade. Nevertheless, he provided a solution which was traditional in assuming that pedagogical reform would be sufficient to secure change. The proposed solution was that the higher education curriculum should be a culture sui generis which would, therefore, be accessible to working-class and middle-class students on equal terms.

Bourdieu did not want a form of reverse discrimination which would make the curriculum preferentially amenable to the working class. He discarded this ‘populist’ solution. He sought to encourage forms of ‘rational pedagogy’ which would introduce students possessing different amounts of cultural capital to the norms and values of the autonomous discourses enshrined in the curricula of higher education institutions.

In this way, Bourdieu’s Algerian vision remained intact. As he tried to argue in ‘Systèmes d’enseignement et systèmes de pensée’ (Bourdieu, 1967), the system of education of a society determines the system of thinking which is available to it. It was, therefore, precisely by sponsoring within its educational system the notion of curricular autonomy that a state might establish institutional contexts within which otherwise competing cultures might encounter each other to fabricate together a consensus which would endorse the state’s authority.

La Reproduction (1970)

The research which was written up in Les Héritiers was conducted on students attending state universities. At the same time, Bourdieu’s colleagues analysed the nature of the processes obtaining in the more prestigious private institutions within the French educational system. They analysed the classes préparatoires and the grandes écoles—an institutionalised conveyer belt on which privileged children were carried naturally forward towards privileged occupational positions.

When, therefore, Bourdieu came to rewrite the early Lille researches in the light of subsequent projects undertaken within the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, Paris, it was not surprising that he should focus on the process of ‘reproduction’ in education and society. La Reproduction (Bourdieu, 1970) represented a decisive break with the ‘Algerian’ view that the encouragement of rational pedagogy within a state controlled education system would in itself create the social solidarity which would confirm the state in its authority. The new recognition, instead, was that any society accommodates a plurality of institutions which perpetuate themselves by educational means. The ‘state’ constitutes itself by balancing rival interest groups. It does not constitute itself by privileging the self-perpetuation secured educationally within the ‘education’ system.

The ideas introduced in La Reproduction are as well known as that of ‘cultural capital’ advanced in Les Héritiers. Propositions which have the status of mathematical or logical formulae spell out the consequences of the initiating contention that “All pedagogic action (PA) is, objectively, symbolic violence in so far as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power” (Bourdieu, 1970—English translation, p. 5). Religious instruction and technical training, for instance, are both forms of pedagogic action and both are mechanisms for initiating students into the world views, either theological or technological, which endorse the religious or technical authority of those controlling the respective educational processes.

The effectiveness of pedagogic action can be measured in all contexts in terms of ‘pedagogic work’, whether enough work has been done to ensure that the students internalise the culturally arbitrary knowledge and values which they receive. The efficiency of the pedagogic process can, in other words, be calculated in terms of the extent to which it functions to enable any interest group to reproduce itself, without reference to any supposed absolute value or truth of the content which is transmitted. Educational processes are just that. They are value free instruments which are equally at the disposal of competing value systems.

In identifying the common features of the pedagogic process or, even more, by implying that all forms of communication possess those same features and can be said to be forms of pedagogy, Bourdieu was accepting that the reproductive practices of the grandes écoles are examples of the ways in which all interest groups normally seek to achieve self-perpetuation. Importantly, this recognition applied to ‘state’ education itself. The providers of ‘state’ education constituted an interest group seeking to exercise symbolic violence in the same way as any other interest ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Comprehension through Use: Working with Bourdieu in Educational Research
• 1 The Practical Importance of Bourdieu’s Analyses of Higher Education
• 2 How Bourdieu bites back: recognising misrecognition in education and educational research
• 3 Emotional Capital and Education: Theoretical Insights from Bourdieu
• 4 The power of one? Conditions which challenge managerial professional development practices
• 5 Using Bourdieu in practice? Urban secondary teachers’ and students’ experiences of a Bourdieusian-inspired pedagogical approach
• 6 Education and Cultural Capital: The Implications of Changing Trends in Education Policies
• 7 Fields and institutional strategy: Bourdieu on the relationship between higher education, inequality and society
• 8 Violent youth or violent schools? A critical incident analysis of symbolic violence
• 9 Bourdieu and the Social Space of the PE Class: Reproduction of Doxa through Practice
• 10 Mainland Chinese students at an elite Hong Kong university: habitus-field disjuncture in a transborder context
• 11 Cultural capital as whiteness? Examining logics of ethno-racial representation and resistance
• 12 Student retention in higher education: the role of institutional habitus
• Index