Kapitał kulturowy jako czynnik reprodukcji nierówności społecznych w teorii Pierre’a Bourdieu

Abstract

The modern Western societies sustain in a hidden form the social inequalities resulting from possession or lack of resources of individual social, cultural and economic capital. The hidden form of sustaining the equalities refers to the education system, which consolidates the existing class structure on the basis of the school selection mechanism. In the presented paper an attempt will be made to show how, despite the progressing social and political pluralism and development of the civil society, the school education system favours individuals with high resources of certain types of capital to disadvantage of pupils with fewer resources. Such reproduction of social inequalities was described in works by P. Bourdieu, whose theory of social capital will be the starting point for the analysis. The key components of the paper will be: discussion of P. Bourdieu’s theory of social capital and presentation of school selection mechanisms as the key factor reproducing social inequalities and divisions. P. Bourdieu indicated that cultural capital was one of the basic and often hidden barriers to social advancement. However, whether an individual makes use of opportunities offered by the environment depends only on his/her specific activities and skills aiming at sustaining and developing the inherited social capital.