PIERRE BOURDIEU’S THEORY OF PEDAGOGICAL ACTION

One of the prominent figures of the French sociology, Pierre Bourdieu argues the system of education, and how this system renders inequalities sustainable with his own set of concepts. Such concepts as habitus, field, doxa, cultural capital and other forms of capital, cultural reproduction, symbolic violence and forms of cultural condition are unique concepts he makes use of in his work. He makes the effect of social class relations and other institutional systems on education a subject-matter of sociology, differently from the Structuralism, and even by getting in serious tension with it. In his work on education, Bourdieu gives a specific importance to the concept of cultural capital. Every kind of potential that is infused into its citizens by the state is defined as cultural capital. Here, schools play the main role. Education is in fact regarded as a system in which the elite come to the fore, while the lower classes gain tendencies to reproduce the system. School is the setting where the nature of this system shows up, and it is one of the leading mechanisms forming the habitus. School is also one of those basic instruments putting symbolic violence into circulation. At this point, there seems to be a similarity between the meaning that Gramsci load to the concept of hegemony and the symbolic violence of Bordieu’s. Just as Gramsci’s imagination of state not only puts its mechanisms of force and pressure into operation but it also calls out its consent mechanisms while setting its hegemony up, in Bourdieu also, the state puts both the physical violence and the symbolic violence into action. School reproduces the relations of the symbolic violence and domination. The concepts of pedagogical action, pedagogical authority, pedagogical labour are unique concepts Bourdieu contributed to sociology of education. This study aims to summarize and discuss Bourdieu’s work on education system.

کلیدواژه ها:

Bourdieu ، education system ، cultural capital ، symbolic violence