Symbolic violence: The disappearance of the individual in marxist thought

Abstract

According to Pierre Bourdieu, educational systems are characterized by inculcation, by a need to produce and reproduce the structural and relational conditions of their existence. This need fulfills the educational system's social function of passing on the "cultural arbitrary "1 of both the school and the society. Schooling cannot deviate from this function: it must reproduce the relations between groups and classes as they exist in schools and in the adult world (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). In their theory of "'symbolic violence "= Bourdieu and his associates pose the phenomenological question: What must an educational system be in order for it to be able to create and maintain the institutional conditions which allow it to produce a "habitus "3 and to assure its misrecognition by students and teachers alike? They found that it was not possible to reduce this question to an historicai search for the social conditions of a particular educational system. Disagreeing with Durkheim (1956) who sought to understand the nature of educational systems by looking to the early Christian habitus and Greco-Roman heritage, they looked at the forms which schooling and society adopt as they try to solve the problems which confront them. They believed that by examining such structures they could come to understand the social forces which gave rise to such social processes as the division of labour and the autonomization of intellectual centres, the development of a bureaucratic organization of educational systems, and so on. Progress made by such systems -- including payment of teachers, organization and training, standardization of educational organizations over a wide area, examinations, civil service status, and the like -- have all been part of the establishment and institutionalization of pedagogic work. Durkheim identified the medieval university as the first educational "system" in Europe because it had within its structure evaluation criteria which validated the results of inculcation (the diploma). This evaluation component was Durkheim's primary consideration because it united the pedagogic action of inculcation and