– In the science classroom, the dominant cultural arbitrary is the requirement for all students to acquire a body of detailed knowledge of the concepts of science whose salience is often not clear; to adopt unfamiliar genres of expression such as the use of the passive voice; and to represent the world using imagined models, which often appear to bear no necessary relation to everyday experience.
– “Violence,” in Bourdieu and Passeron’s sense, is also done by ensuring that students who survive this experience have neither a strong sense of what are the major explanatory ideas of the domain nor the standard methods by which such ideas have been obtained and justified.
– The second manner in which symbolic violence is achieved is through the language that science is communicated. It is the academic language which is the dominant barrier to comprehension of science and not its technical vocabulary. As the habitus of students from the dominant cultural elite is one in which such language is a common feature, these students have a privileged access to the institutionalized capital that school science offers.
– In Bourdieu’s terms, this lack of attention to reasoning and thinking skills is not surprising as “the more completely [pedagogic work] succeeds in imposing misrecognition of the dominant arbitrary” (1977, p. 40), the more effective it is at ensuring it reproduces “the structure of power relations between the groups and classes.” If students do not acquire the intellectual capabilities required to access, comprehend, and question the ideology of the dominant classes, which are largely conveyed in such texts, then there is little chance that they will engage critically with science.
– A student’s display of the dominant form of cultural capital is often mistaken in an educational setting for natural aptitude. The logical corollary is that a lack of cultural capital is often inappropriately identified as a lack of natural ability
– For Bourdieu and Passeron, the low level of technical efficiency of the system and alienation of many students is a price that science is willing to pay. As for scientists, such failings are of little concern as long as the system is functionally effective in providing a sufficient supply to reproduce a body of professional scientists and sustain their position of privilege in society.
– An authoritative and unquestioning science education serves those in power who see a knowledgeable, critical, and scientifically literate populace as a threat to the existing social order.
– The science curriculum pays scant attention to communicating the role, significance, and value of scientific careers to both the individual and society.
– The pedagogic work of schools is to socialize their students in the values, expectations, and attitudes that enable them to put up with inequality- essentially to accept their lot in life rather than providing their students with the skills and knowledge either to challenge the dominant cultural arbitrary or to gain entry to privileged elites.
2012 - Bourdieu’s Notion of Cultural Capital and Its Implications for the Science Curriculum
For Bourdieu, cultural capital “represents the immanent structure of the social world,” determining at any given moment what it is possible for any individual to achieve. Bourdieu divided cultural capital into three distinct forms. The embodied state of cultural capital, which includes “long lasting dispositions of the mind and body” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 47), takes time to acquire and is transmitted from one person to another, most commonly from parent to child. In the objectified state, it takes the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments) and can easily be transmitted in its materiality. However, this form requires embodied capital to fully appreciate and use it beneficially. Finally, cultural capital can exist in the institutionalized state, in the form of academic or other formal qualifications, which are “a certificate of cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect to culture” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 50).
Students who possess the “right kind” of cultural capital (i.e., the forms valued by schools), and a lot of it, achieve more in the education system. From this perspective, schools are not passive in their role but rather actively legitimize certain forms of knowledge and the distribution of this form of cultural capital.