ABSTRACT
Class membership is defined, at least within the Marxist tradition, in terms of the individual’s access to and control of economic capital (such as industrial machinery, raw materials and also finance). Pierre Bourdieu (1973) drew an analogy to an individual’s access to cultural resources in order to explain the workings of the educational system in a class-divided capitalist society. Children will have differing degrees of cultural competence (including information and skills), acquired prior to school within the family. The education system will not then overtly discriminate in favour of the children of the dominant class. Rather, all children will be assessed ‘neutrally’, in terms of their ability to perform according to the same criteria of excellence. These criteria will, however, be derived from the dominant culture. The children of the dominant class will do better, so yielding interest (in terms of ‘symbolic power’) on their parents’ investment in cultural capital.
