Cultural Capital

• Cultural capital

  The knowledge, attitude, values, language, taste, and abilities of the middle class
• Middle-class culture

  Like a cabbage, it gives an advantage to those who possess it
• Middle-class children

  • Acquire the ability to grasp, analyse and express abstract ideas
  • More likely to develop intellectual interest and an understanding of what the education system requires for success
• Middle-class children

  Have an advantage in school because their culture and interests are highly valued
• Working-class children

  • Find that school devalues their culture as rough and inferior
  • Their lack of cultural capital leads to exam failure
• Working-class pupils

  Get the message that education is not meant for them and respond by turning early leaving or just not trying school
• Educational capital

  What middle-class parents can convert their economic capital into for their children
• Ways middle-class parents convert economic capital to educational capital

  • Sending them to private school
  • Paying for extra tuition
• Middle-class parents

  More likely to be able to afford a house in the catchment area of a school that is highly placed in the exam league tables
• Selection by mortgage

  The process where the cost of houses near successful schools is driven up, excluding working-class families
• Testing Bourdieu's ideas


  1. Sullivan used questionnaires to conduct a survey of 465 people in four schools to assess their cultural capital

  2. Asked about a range of activities such as reading and TV viewing habits and whether they visited art galleries, museums and theatres
• Those who read complex fiction and watched serious TV documentaries developed wide vocabulary and cultural knowledge, indicating greater cultural capital
• The pupils with the greatest cultural capital were children of graduates
• These pupils were more likely to be successful
• Cultural capital only accounted for a part of the class difference in achievement
• Where people of different classes had the same level of cultural capital, middle-class people still did better