Teachers’ Adaptations to Ethnic Minority Students in Belgium and England

The question “Is the educational system meritocratic?” has dominated much sociological work in education since the 1970s. Infl uenced by Marxist social theory (Althusser, 1971; Bowles & Gintis, 1976), sociologists and educational researchers have paid considerable attention to the role of schools and educational systems in “reproducing social inequalities” in education. In their discourse, many researchers have used very different and sometimes contradictory notions of “inequality” and “social reproduction” (Hammersley, 2009). Whereas research in Europe has focused more on social class inequalities (Bourdieu, 1966/1974; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), U.S. researchers have traditionally paid closer attention to racial inequalities in education (Giroux, 1983).