[Book review] Culture, power and education : representation, interpretation, contestation

Abstract

One could argue that another sociological study that asserts that education and the arts are inherently political is unnecessary. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s classic Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977), originally published in French in 1970, convincingly demonstrated how social hierarchies and dominant cultural values are perpetuated by ‘pedagogic actions’ through a process of symbolic violence that reinforces existing power structures. Bourdieu and Passeron also showed how children from specific social origins lagged behind at school due to various perceived ‘deficiencies’, including linguistic capital, which serves as a tool for communication yet also determines the students’ ability to make sense of logical and aesthetic structures throughout compulsory schooling and beyond.