SOC 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Multicultural Education, Xenocentrism, Cultural Capital
Document Summary
Haralambos and holborn (1995:764) state that the subculture of low income groups is deficiency in certain important respects which are linguistic deprivation, experimental, cognitive and personality deficiencies. The theory places the blame for educational failure on the children and their families, their neighbourhoods and the sub culture of their social group. Was a french sociologist mostly influenced by marxism. He blames the failure of working class children on the education system which is systematically biased towards the culture of the dominant social classes. The knowledge and skills of the working class become redundant. The role of education is to reproduce the culture of the dominant class. He refers the dominant culture as cultural capital because through the educational system it can be translated into wealth and power. Students with upper class backgrounds have a built in advantage of culture capital e. g. they possess the linguistic code used in the schools.
