Cultural Capital

The concept of cultural capital (sometimes referred to as culture capital) was originally developed by Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist influenced by the earlier work of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. Cultural capital can be used to describe those cultural practices, experiences, perspectives, and knowledge that are passed along from one generation to the next and can have a significant impact on a person's encounter with a different social or cultural group. How people place a particular value or lack of value upon particular forms of cultural capital can help educators understand how and under what conditions students learn best and achieve success in school. The concept of cultural capital can thus be used to examine how the enterprise of education acts as a critical springboard, granting the potential for minorities to transcend socioeconomic class differences. However, cultural capital also serves to explain how schools regulate and even regenerate these differences through the validation of the existing or dominant social class structure. According to Bourdieu, students in school are socialized and taught in a manner that consistently perpetuates their class status. In a very basic sense, cultural capital can be thought of as “coins in your pocket,” with “coins” being a metaphor for the cultural attributes a student brings to school. The currency that each student can render will correlate with positive outcomes that subsequently translate into a better education, and school success will facilitate the young person's acculturation into mainstream society. This presupposes, of course, that the school accepts the cultural “coins” of all their students and values them.

Bourdieu's theory largely revolves around four key points. First, each social class reproduces its own unique form of cultural capital. Second, schools are institutions that largely serve to add value to the cultural capital of the upper class and subtract value from the cultural capital of the lower class. Third, the notion of success in school consistently favors the upper class, and this success is later translated into tangible economic wealth. Fourth, schools act as a symbolic crossroad that officially sanctions the existing social hierarchy through their complementary academic hierarchy.

Another important dimension of Bourdieu's theory is the concept of the habitus, defined as the shared attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that are rendered within one's environment. Perceptions in relation to the habitus are not individual, but are, rather, the perceptions that encompass the wider beliefs shared in a consensus among members of a particular community. For example, having a preference for attending a musical concert of either classical music or punk rock reflects particular individual dispositions and a particular habitus given those preferences; however, the [Page 198]habitus between classical music and punk rock reflects elements unique to the wider perception of socioeconomic status and affluence among a particular community of music listeners. The habitus can also reaffirm negative predispositions, such as how classical music is better than punk rock because it is situated within a particular perception of affluence. A more relevant example can reveal how some English language learners (ELLs) could be led to believe that pursuing a higher education is an option limited only to fluent-English-speaking White students.

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