Assess the extent to which class differences in educational attainment may be explained by the concept of ‘cultural capital’.

Class difference is a major factor that affects al students in all schools around the world. This is not just about the colour of your skin but also about the ‘class’ that you are put into when you are born. If you have rich parents then you are upper class and are expected to do better than a working class student. Depending on what class you are in you will have different amounts of ‘cultural capital’. Pierre Bourdieu was the man who came up with this term. Bourdieu refers to the dominant culture as ‘culture capital’ because whoever is the ruling class can make education biased and so therefore easier for upper class children to attain better grades. This is because the particularistic values at home are the same as the universalistic values transmitted at school so they compliment each other. So what Bourdieu is saying is that people who are born as upper class have a distinct advantage over those from working class families. One of the factors that affect this advantage is speech. There are two different types of speech, restricted and elaborated. The working class tend to use restricted speech; this is a type of speech where reasoning isn’t used just short answers without explanations and is very hard for someone who doesn’t normally speak like that to understand it. Elaborated speech is the kind of speech that is used by upper and middle class people. It gives explanations for choices and uses quite complex speech in general. Bourdieu is criticised, however, because of the vagueness of his ‘cultural capital’.

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Klineberg said that environmental factors were also very important such as the school itself where Klineberg says that teachers label you as soon as they see you. What is meant by this is that if you are working class then you are unlikely to be able to afford new clothes and equipment all the time and the teachers pick up on this so they expect you to do rubbish academically, however, if you are upper class then the teachers will pay more attention to you and expect you to do better than working class students. Becker backs up this theory about labelling and also talks about ‘self fulfilling prophesy’, this means that when students are told that they will never make it in life they believe it and don’t bother to try this is why a lot of working class students form a counter-school culture where they just doss around.

Halsey undertook a study of 8500 men and followed their progress over a long period of time; this is called a longitudinal study. Halsey found that children from different classes did more or less the same up the age of 11. However at this age of 11 material influences cut in and Halsey discovered a direct link between income and academic achievement because of the added costs of books and extra equipment etc.

This study can be criticised by the fact that Halsey only used men in his study.

Sugarman talked about middle class jobs having opportunity for advancement and pay rises so the workers had something to work towards. However working class jobs have little room for advancement and the people who work in these jobs are already prepared for them and form a counter shop-floor culture that the basis of which is learned at school.

J.W.B. Douglas who wrote ‘The Home and the School’ did a longitudinal study from 1946 to 1962. He found that there were significant variations in educational attainment between students of similar abilities but of different social class. Douglas also found that people in the higher classes tended to stay in the educational system longer. Douglas also related educational attainment to family size, the student’s health, and family interest in the Childs education. He found that family interest was the most important factor. He found that parents of upper class students would visit the school on a regular basis and go to all the parent evenings and therefore encouraging the student that school was a good thing whereas working class parents would rarely turn up for these types of occasion. Blackstone and Mortimer criticised this and said that working class students parents could a lot of the time not actually get to school because they were working or because the parents felt intimidated by the other parents and maybe even the teachers.