StayIN – Education is here to stay!

Cultural Capital and Educational Inequality

by Kai Pflug

I admit that the title of this blog post does not sound very inviting. Not every post can have a title like “Monster truck crashes into aggressive Tyrannosaurus Rex.” Which, of course, is a shame.

The term “cultural capital” comes from a French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. He uses this term to describe education that brings benefits to a person living with other people. According to his definition, a subcategory of this cultural capital is embodied cultural capital. This is the knowledge acquired through education that a person carries with them. It is also referred to as educational capital.

Why does Bourdieu speak of capital, even though this is more of an economic term? Because this educational capital has specific (and partly economic) benefits for those, who own it. Those with a higher level of education find it easier to find well-paid work, are viewed more highly in society, have easier access to networks of people with a similarly high level of education, and so on.

A good thing, then, this educational capital, right? As a result, all parents should strive to give their children as much of it as possible. But that is precisely not the case. Parents who have a high level of educational capital themselves (or simply: who are more educated) rate this higher and therefore invest more in their children’s education (often they also have better financial opportunities to do this, as the level of education and income are usually correlated in our society).

This is a blog post for StayIN, so I should explain what all this has to do with StayIN. StayIN focuses on students whose parents cannot provide their children with sufficient educational capital. This may be because the parents themselves are not very educated, or they come from a different cultural background, i.e., they do not have the educational capital that is relevant here. StayIN tries to compensate for this.

Sure, the schools should actually do this compensating job – but they only have very limited resources to address inequalities among the students. StayIN doesn’t even try to help all students – we focus on those who need it most and can benefit the most. To do this, we use mentors who provide individual educational capital to the StayIN students. And, of course, when selecting our mentors, we ensure they have the relevant educational capital and can pass this on.

Now that I’ve written the above paragraphs, I’m considering whether the theoretical background described at the beginning of the text is really relevant. Maybe it would have been enough to say the following: Education opens up opportunities in life. It is, therefore, difficult for children who receive little support in acquiring an education. StayIN tries to help these children.

But of course, then it would only have been a very short blog post.

Photo by cottonbro

Originally posted 2024-03-16 14:01:21.