Bourdieu - education and reproduction

Richard Harker

pp. 86-108

in: Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar, Chris Wilkes (eds), An introduction to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstract

Many English-speaking commentators seem to assume that Bourdieu's fundamental work on education is to be found in two major books (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; 1979) and a number of articles (Bourdieu 1967; 1971; 1973b; 1974: Bourdieu and St Martin 1974).² But those who think this are mistaken. To the extent that these works constitute the limit of reading they constrain a proper understanding of Bourdieu's theoretical enterprise, which has blossomed from a continual reworking of his ethnographic material from Algeria (Bourdieu 1962; 1963; 1973; 1977; 1979), and from France itself (Bourdieu 1984). The essential point is that it is inappropriate to extrapolate Bourdieu's theoretical enterprise solely from the educational writings, since they predate the intensive development of his theory of practice during the 1970s. Hence evaluations of Bourdieu that appear in the educational literature and which do not take into account these later theoretical developments, are inadequate and misleading. This chapter attempts to overcome such difficulties.