cultural & material deprivation

• Cultural deprivation is the idea that suggests that some children, usually from a working class background, lack the right ‘tastes’ and experiences outside of school to succeed.
• • Lack of cultural experiences, i.e theatres or museums, lead to worse academic results. This is an idea known as ‘cultural literacy’ created by E.D Hirsch.
• • Parents with a positive attitude towards school will pass that on to their children, and may help children more than if the opposite were true.
• Working class children speak in a ‘restricted code’, which restricts their ability to participate and thus do well in school. This is the idea that working class children have a limited vocabulary compared to other classes, and was created by Basil Bernstein.
• Material deprivation is when a student lacks the money or resources needed to do well.
• • Lower income students tend to leave school as soon as possible, due to the need to work.
• • The same students also avoid university due to fear of debt, thus trapping them into a cycle of poverty.
• • Lack of resources such as tutors or textbooks mean that students might not do as well as they could have if such things were readily available to them.