Pupils class identities and the school

• Habitus

  The dispositions or taken for granted ways of thinking and acting that are shared by a particular social class, including their taste and preferences about lifestyles and consumption, such as fashion and leisure, their outlook on life, and their expectations about what is normal or realistic for people like them
• A group's habitus is formed as a response to its position in the class structure
• The middle-class have the power to define their habitus as superior and to impose it on the education system
• As a result, the school puts a higher value on middle-class taste, performance, and so on, hence why middle-class children perform highly
• Symbolic capital

  Status and recognition gained by pupils who have been socialised at home into middle-class tastes and performances
• Symbolic violence

  The withholding of symbolic capital from working-class people, whose taste and lifestyle are deemed as worthless, which reproduces the class structure and keeps them in their place
• There is a clash between working-class people's habitus and the school's middle-class habitus, which may cause working-class students to experience the world of education as unnatural
• Working-class students may feel that to be educationally successful, they have to change how they talk and present themselves, which is often experienced as a process of losing oneself to become 'posh'
• Nike identities

  Meaningful class identities constructed by working-class people through the heavy investment in styles, especially through the consumption of brands such as Nike, as a way of being themselves without having to conform to the school's middle-class habitus
• Working-class pupils' performances of Nike styles are a struggle for recognition, while the middle-class see these identities as tasteless
• Working-class people's rejection of higher education is seen as both unrealistic (not for people like them) and undesirable (it would not suit their preferred lifestyles and habitats)
• Working-class pupils' investment in Nike identities is not only a cause of their educational marginalisation by the school, but also expresses their positive performance for a particular lifestyle, leading to self-elimination or self-exclusion from education
• Some working-class people do succeed educationally, as shown in a study of two groups of working-class Catholic boys from the same deprived neighbourhood in Belfast, where the grammar school had a strongly middle-class habitus of high expectations and academic achievements, while the secondary school had a habitus of low expectations
• Despite the close inequality in education, many more working-class young people now go on to university, but they are often reluctant to apply to elite universities such as Oxbridge, as they feel these places are 'not for the like of us'
• Working-class people's habitus and identities formed outside school may conflict with the school's middle-class habitus, resulting in symbolic violence and pupils feeling that education is not for people like them

  This can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy and underachievement