ABSTRACT
The role of children's agency in the socio-cultural reproduction of educational inequality is mostly overlooked by quantitative research in education. This is problematic because a potentially important source of variance in children's educational success is not included in the analyses. Childhood Studies offers different ways to conceptualise children's agency. To address the role of children's agency in educational inequality, the authors outline a conceptual framework that merges socio-cultural reproduction theory following Bourdieu with the idea of children's agency. Using quantitative data on elementary school children and their parents, the authors ask how children contribute to the reproduction of educational inequality. They explore the links between children's dispositions towards school, their out-of-school practices and social class, and they discuss the implications of their findings for investigating children's agency in both Childhood Studies and educational research.
