ABSTRACT
The authors recently spent a year with a class of 13- to 14-year-olds in a fairly typical London school. Insofar as "taste classifies and it classifies the classifier", their fieldwork revealed young people's lives lived between the social conservativism of family and school life and the mediated imaginaries made possible through media connections. While parents often used digital media as part of their efforts to build a bridge between home and school, albeit sometimes unsuccessfully, a further theme emerging from the study of media use was the desire for positive disconnections. Social reproduction occurs as much, if not even more, at home than at school as families with already-greater economic and cultural capital work competitively to sustain their social advantages. In effect, education is a key instrument for the social reproduction of inequality, notwithstanding that it professes "fairness". This intensifies the felt burden on parents as they struggle to ensure that their child can be included among school's beneficiaries.
