Bourdieu for Educators

Policy and Practice

Fenwick W. English, Cheryl L. Bolton

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781412996594
• eBook ISBN: 9781483315959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Educational change and reform on a larger scale  

Bourdieu for Educators: Policy and Practice brings the revolutionary research and thinking of Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) of France to public educational leaders in North America, Canada, Australia, and the U.K. This text brings Bourdieu's work into the arena of elementary and secondary educational reform and change, and offers policy, research, and practice discussions. Authors Fenwick W. English and Cheryl L. Bolton use Bourdieu to challenge the standards movement in different countries, the current vision of effective management, and the open-market notion connecting pay to performance. The text shows that connecting pay to performance won't improve education for the poorest group of school students in the U.S., Canada, or the U.K., regardless of how much money is spent trying to erase the achievement gap. The authors lay out the bold educational agenda of Pierre Bourdieu by demonstrating that educational preparation must take into account larger socioeconomic-political realities in order for educational change and reform to make an impact.

1 Introducing Pierre Bourdieu to the Practitioner

What This Chapter is About

The name Pierre Bourdieu may not be familiar to many educational practitioners in public school settings in the United States, the United Kingdom, or anywhere else. This introductory chapter is aimed at acquainting the school-practitioner reader (teacher, administrator, counselor, social worker) with a general appraisal of Bourdieu and why his stature continues to grow internationally. It also is an attempt to indicate why Bourdieu’s ideas, research, and thought are powerful, insightful, and useful despite being somewhat difficult to understand initially.

Specifically, this chapter addresses the following points:

• Bourdieu’s concept of a social space as contested presents a fluid and dynamic model of contestation in education, along with the notion of misrecognition.
• Bourdieu’s unique vocabulary for concepts presents an initial dilemma in coming to a quick and easy understanding of his work.
• Bourdieu’s concepts and ideas have to be seen not in the usual linear fashion (A, B, C, etc.) but as an integrated whole that does not depend on unequivocal categorical definitional boundaries. Ideas are defined not by themselves but in relation to other ideas. Readers accustomed to conceptual singularity and stand-alone definitions may find this feature of Bourdieu’s body of work off-putting at first. We will work hard to ease this transition and any potential tension it creates.

Introduction

Educational practitioners may not know Bourdieu because the world of classroom and administrative practice was not one in which he traveled, wrote, or researched. He penned no popular works on how to improve schools or teaching. For most of his career, Bourdieu was a sequestered academic in a prestigious French university, where he pursued his research interests in sociology.

Even among fellow academics, Bourdieu was somewhat of an eccentric. He was a trenchant critic of the French educational system for its failure to live up to its Republican aims (Lane, 2006). In this respect, his criticisms have great appeal and relevance to other educational systems in other countries that are anchored in a universal approach to education irrespective of class and/or wealth and yet consistently produce results that privilege and reinforce class and wealth.

The disparity between educational goals and educational results so readily observable in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and other nations is not produced by a failure of political aims or even funding. Huge monetary sums, public and private, have been allocated in the United States and elsewhere to eliminate disparities in promoting educational achievement that are rooted in race, class, and social position. But Bourdieu’s work cuts through the political rhetoric and exposes the interests of those who control public education, showing how their selection of reforms is designed to maintain their dominant position in determining what schools do to reinforce and perpetuate social inequality.

In short, Bourdieu’s work exposes the contradiction behind the mask of democratic and meritocratic goals and reforms, and shows why none of them will likely erase the achievement gaps and other discrepancies that currently exist in educational systems. It isn’t that the public educational system can’t be reformed; rather, it is unlikely to be reformed under any of the proposed political approaches currently being debated in the popular public and policy circles, and especially not with approaches centered on school choice and privatization (the neoliberal agenda Bourdieu vehemently fought against as a public intellectual in the latter part of his life). These popular approaches are not designed to confront social inequalities that emerging research strongly suggests are at the root of the gaps in school achievement (Condron, 2011; Sahlberg, 2011). In the end, they only serve to perpetuate these inequalities.

Bourdieu’s work, conducted over an extended time period, helps in reexamining the nature of public schooling everywhere. His dogged pursuit of how public schools continue to fail the public is what ultimately makes him worth reading, to help school leaders and teachers understand more accurately how the work they do in the schools will or will not transform them into more democratic and truly meritocratic institutions. The true nature of Bourdieu’s work rests on his understanding of the forms of cultural power and domination (see Lebaron, 2010). This is the work that has propelled Bourdieu into the international fame on which his reputation rests today.

Bourdieu (1990b) believed that by using the instruments of sociology he could discern the mental categories and structures teachers used in schools and, by so doing, could reveal the social dichotomies and disparities that educational systems teach (see also Savage & English, 2013). He professed that “sociology unmasks self-deception, that collectively entertained and encouraged form of lying to oneself which, in every society, is at the basis of the most sacred values and, thereby, of all social existence” (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 188). Bourdieu’s life in the academy, his humble beginnings as a student of the lower classes, and his belief in the power of self-criticism, even as it contained blind spots he himself was not always able to discern, all provide lessons for those who desire a more broadly based avenue for humanistic education in public schools everywhere.

Bourdieu’s Biography

Bourdieu (2004b) was a firm advocate of reflexive approaches, acutely aware of how his own experiences influenced his thinking; yet he was contemptuous of biography as a method of discerning truth. He wrote about himself as a critique of his life and work, and underscored that this remembrance was not a biography. As a result of his avoidance of traditional biography, there is not a lot of intimate, personal data about him beyond a kind of general outline of his 72 years of life (1930–2002).

Bourdieu was born in 1930 in a small village in the French Pyrenees. His family was of modest means, and the particular French dialect he spoke is no longer considered a living variation of the language today. He was sent to a boarding school and exhibited superior academic ability, though aspects of his boarding school experience were filled with the usual form of torment and bullying from other boys. He completed his secondary education in Paris and graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1955 with a degree in philosophy.

Although Bourdieu would rise to the heights of the French university system, he always had some ambivalence toward it. He railed against the conformity of the university and found himself confronting an intellectual world that believed itself to be liberated and open-minded but that he found to be profoundly conservative and conformist. This insight moved him to comment, “I have almost always found myself on the opposite side from the models and modes dominant in the field” (Bourdieu, 2004b, p. 106).

Bourdieu’s failure to submit his doctoral thesis was part and parcel of his refusal to play the university game and submit to its rules. Later, he consoled himself with a line from Kafka, which counseled, “Do not present yourself before a court whose verdict you do not recognize” (Bourdieu, 2004b, p. 101).

One of the defining moments in his life was being sent to Algeria during the war for Algerian independence from France. The terror and brutality of that colonial conflict changed his outlook on his life’s work. France invaded Algeria, a state of some 919,500 square miles in northwest Africa, in 1830 and made it a French colony in 1848. Subsequently, thousands of Europeans migrated to Algeria and settled there, subjecting the local Sunni Muslim population to European culture and power. The European population confiscated land and set themselves up to be the arbiters of all matters, over the local inhabitants. However, a war for independence broke out in 1954. After 7 years of protracted and bitter fighting, during which “at least 100,000 Muslims and 10,000 French soldiers were killed, Algeria became independent in 1962” (Lagasse, 1994, p. 21).

Bourdieu went to Algeria to finish out his military service in 1955 (Grenfell, 2007, p. 13). There, he was witness to extreme violence and bloodshed in which “the scale of reprisals and torture carried out by the French paratroopers shocked the nation” (p. 38). Bourdieu (2004b) recalls that he refused to enter the reserve officers’ college because he “could not bear the idea of dissociating [himself] from the rank-and-file soldiers” and because he found that he shared little in common with the candidates for officer (p. 37).

On the ship that took him to Algeria, he wrote that he tried in vain to ask the soldiers, “illiterates from the whole of western France” (Bourdieu, 2004b, p. 95), tough questions about going to war. He confessed that he tried to stir in them “the need to revolt against the absurd ‘pacification’ which [they] were being sent to assist” (p. 95), but he made little headway as they replied, “You’ll get us all killed” (p. 95).

Despite the country being in upheaval because of the war, Bourdieu carried out extensive sociological studies of Algerian society with the idea of showing “the extent to which French colonialism had destroyed it” (Grenfell, 2004, p. 39). He studied the four major groups that formed non-European Algerian society: the Kabyles, the Shawia, the Mozabites, and the Arab-speaking peoples. He contrasted traditional social norms with modern norms, especially highlighting the differences in gender roles in the traditional societies. He wrote several books about his experiences in Algeria, particularly important among them being The Logic of Practice (1980/1990a).

This period of time was important to Bourdieu. He was totally engaged in his sociological studies, and he believed that his intensity of effort was “rooted . . . in the extreme sadness and anxiety in which [he] lived” (Bourdieu, 2004b, p. 47). Thinking back on his time in Algeria, Bourdieu confessed that it involved a “transformation of [his] vision of the world” (p. 58) and that his personal motivation there was prompted by his need “to overcome [his] guilty conscience about merely being a participant observer in this appalling war” (Honneth, Kocyba, & Schwibs, 1986, p. 44).

From an educational standpoint, Algeria was a pivotal time for Bourdieu because his ethnographic studies of Algerian society showed him the power of education to change traditional modes of thinking and acting. He understood why the traditional community of Algerian elders resisted education: They correctly perceived the threat it posed to their native ways of thinking and their own positions of authority in their communities.

Bourdieu also began to map out a social class taxonomy of Algerian society and to examine how larger societal changes impacted various class levels and the people within them. His explanation of change was at odds with the views of others, including “intellectuals with Marxist sympathies” (Grenfell, 2007, p. 72).

A key insight was that the group of people in Algerian society, or any society for that matter, who had economic security and stability also had the capability to forward-project time into a state that did not exist (i.e., what we would call the future). People that had no such material conditions had no such capacity. In short, they could not consider a future at all.

According to Grenfell (2007), Bourdieu also tried to reconcile the competing demands and contradictions of modern society and its need for education. As he worked in this area, he rejected a “highly centralized, top-down driven education agenda” (p. 74). In its place, he considered the possibility of a different approach in which the individual and the larger social structure might be harmonized.

It was in Algeria that Bourdieu began to construct a vision that would connect individuals “with the social structures that surrounded them and the personal cognitive structures which guided their thoughts and actions” (Grenfell, 2007, p. 75). When he left Algeria to return to France, “education became his prime focus of work” (p. 75).

Bourdieu returned to France in 1960 and became a graduate assistant to Raymond Aron, a leading French philosopher of the period who was connected to an inner circle of top-ranked academics such as Jean-Paul Sartre (Collins, 1998, p. 775). He did some university teaching and was named the director of the Center for European Sociology, where he wrote two important books in education: Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture with Jean-Claude Passeron (1970/2000) and Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972/1977).

His work with Passeron was a landmark book and has gone through numerous reprintings since it was first released. Grenfell (2007) claims “it is this book, more than any other, which establishes Bourdieu’s reputation and it is still among the most-cited of his works” (p. 94).

Bourdieu (1990b) characterized his academic work by reflecting, “For me, intellectual life is closer to the artist’s life than to the routines of academic life” (p. 26). While Bourdieu remained in the broad sociological traditions of inquiry for most of his academic career, he was not afraid to cross over into other fields if he believed it was necessary. He was thus a border crosser, and his writing has to be seen as representing his determination not to be confined or defined within a neat academic box. He spoke out on what moved him, and he used a wide variety of public forums to do so, from popular magazines to the usual, more esoteric academic journals read by very few politicians and pundits. Bourdieu was that rare academic who was comfortable tackling controversies in the more mainline avenues of public discourse. He also incurred academic criticism from his colleagues for these public forays. The translation from academic discourse to more mainline venues is replete with the dangers of overstatement and easy generalization. Bourdieu accepted this danger and appeared not to be unduly concerned about it.

Vielseitigkeit: What Is Distinctive About Bourdieu

Several distinctive aspects of Bourdieu’s work have to be understood to come to grips with the power of his ideas. First, Bourdieu pursued his work as a practicing sociologist. He was interested in working to understand and resolve certain issues within sociology. He was not first and foremost a theorist; theory was a practical means to help him resolve problems he encountered in his field studies. He believed in working from the ground up—that is, dealing with real issues in context and backing into theory to bring coherence to his work.

Bourdieu’s work is also evolutionary. He was constantly reappraising and recentering key concepts. Bourdieu also brought to his work a special vocabulary to define his major concepts and lines of intellectual development. The purpose of that vocabulary was to avoid having to dispel all the numerous layers of meaning that come with familiar terms. By using newly invented words he could attach his own meanings, and he could also connect them in a way that suited his ideas regarding their application. As Swartz (1997) notes, Bourdieu believed that “the experience of familiarity . . . stands as one of the principal obstacles to a scientific understanding of the social world”; so in his work he “self-consciously selects terminology and cultivates a writing style that establishes distance from everyday language use” (p. 13).

Bourdieu’s concept...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Brief Contents
• Detailed Contents
• Preface
• About the Authors
• 1 Introducing Pierre Bourdieu to the Practitioner
• 2 Unmasking the School Asymmetry and the Social System
• 3 The Curriculum, Qualifications, and Life Chances
• 4 The Shifting Control of Leadership Preparation
• 5 A Retrospective Look at Bourdieu’s Impact
• References
• Index
• Publisher Note