Education: Class (external)- Cultural capital

Question 1

Pierre Bourdieu

Answer 1

He argues that each social class possess its own cultural framework or set of ideas, which he calls a habitus. This habitus is achieved through socialisation. No one class habitus is better than the other, but the dominant social class has the power to impose its own habitus in the education system, so what counts as educational knowledge is not the ‘culture of society as a whole’ but that of the dominant social class.

Question 2

Alice Sullivan

Answer 2

Cultural capital only accounted for part of class different in educational achievement- when pupils of different classes had the same amount of cultural capital, middle class children still did better.