ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) grew up in rural France. He came from modest circumstances. His father, the son of a peasant sharecropper, was a poorly paid civil servant who ran a rural post office in a remote village in Bearn in the Pyrenees. Bourdieu’s village primary school classmates were the children of peasants, shopkeepers and craftsmen. His early academic success was largely due, he suggested, to the encouragement of his father, rather than his teachers (Bourdieu, 2007). Bourdieu left home as a youngster to become a boarder at the regional lycée in Pau, where he was, by his own account, far from a model student. He was only able to take his baccalaureate exams because the school headmaster intervened in a dispute between a feisty young Bourdieu and a senior member of staff (2007, p. 90). As a child, Bourdieu benefitted from both family and institutional support, a point that was not lost on him in his later career.
