Cultural Capital in the Preschool Years: Can the State ‘Compensate’ for the Family?

Abstract

The question posed in the title to this chapter is prompted by the current English government’s apparent thinking in devising policies for young children and their families. Asking this question while thinking about Bourdieu immediately evokes the assertion made by his contemporary, the sociologist Basil Bernstein. Bernstein’s article, ‘Education cannot compensate for society’ (1970) challenged the contemporary belief that schooling could reverse the early disadvantage experienced by children from lower social classes. The inequalities that Bernstein describes, which he saw as unevenly distributed across social groups, were very similar to those that Bourdieu was simultaneously identifying as ‘forms of capital’ (1997 [1986]), the most important of which in relation to school success was cultural capital. Bernstein’s rationale for his assertion lay in an account of how inequalities constructed during early childhood are entrenched during the school years, and persist through the life-course. Bourdieu, by alternative routes, was tackling very similar questions: in particular, how the acquisition of life’s advantages — leading in the end to knowledge and power — begins in the earliest relationships within the family, and how these advantages are legitimised by the education system.