Bourdieu's Notion of Cultural Capital and Its Implications for the Science Curriculum

8/18/2019 Bourdieu's Notion of Cultural Capital and Its Implications for the Science Curriculum

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Science

Education

ISSUES AND TRENDS

Bourdieu’s Notion of Cultural Capitaland Its Implications for the ScienceCurriculum

STEPHANIE CLAUSSEN,1 JONATHAN OSBORNE2

1 Department of Electrical Engineering and 2Graduate School of Education, Stanford

University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

Received 18 July 2011; accepted 22 August 2012

DOI 10.1002/sce.21040

Published online 14 December 2012 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital has significant

value for identifying the “worth” of a science education. His notion of “embodied,” “objec-

tified,” and “institutionalized” cultural capital is used as a theoretical lens to identify both

the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge and its extrinsic value for future employment.

This analysis suggests that science education misses three opportunities to establish its

value to its students and the wider public. First, science education commonly has a poor

understanding of the nature of embodied capital that it offers, failing to communicate the

cultural achievement that science represents. Second, it fails to see itself as a means of

developing the critical dispositions of mind, which are the hallmark of a scientist but alsouseful to all citizens. Third, given the policy emphasis on educating the next generation

of scientists, it fails to exploit the one major element of cultural capital that science ed-

ucation is currently seen to offer by scientists, the public, and its students—that is the

value that science qualifications have for future employment. Bourdieu’s concept that the

primary function of education is to sustain the culture and privilege of the dominant groups

in society offers a lens that helps to identify how and why these apparent contradictions

exist. Drawing on Bourdieu’s ideas, we develop a perspective to critique current practice

and identify the possible contributions science education might make to remediating social

injustice. C 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 97:58–79, 2013

Correspondence to: Stephanie Claussen; e-mail: [email protected]

C 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


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CULTURAL CAPITAL AND THE SCIENCE CURRICULUM 59

INTRODUCTION

During his lifetime, the Frenchman Pierre Bourdieu tackled a number of seemingly

eclectic issues, which, when combined, paint a picture of how individuals conduct their

lives in the social and cultural context in which they exist (Webb, Schirato, & Danaher,2002). Two of the concepts he proposed—“habitus” and “cultural capital”—provide a

unique perspective from which to analyze the function of education. Bourdieu conceives

of “habitus” as a set of social and cultural practices, values, and dispositions that are

characterized by the ways social groups interact with their members; whereas “cultural

capital” is the knowledge, skills, and behaviors that are transmitted to an individual within

their sociocultural context through pedagogic action1 (Bourdieu, 1986), in particular by the

family. Formal education is important because it can be viewed as an academic market for

the distribution of cultural capital: Those who enter the classroom with sufficient cultural

capital of the appropriate, dominant type—capital that fits well with the discourse and values

of schools—are well positioned to increase their cultural capital further. In addition, researchshows that the habitus of such students enables them to acquire substantial additional capital

in informal contexts (Alexander, Entwisle, & Olson, 2007; Tavernise, 2012). In contrast,

students who possess cultural capital of a form that is incongruent with the culture of the

school, or who lack it altogether, are at a distinct disadvantage. One of the challenges of

education in general, and science education in particular, is how to increase a student’s

stock of the dominant cultural capital, regardless of the nature of any prior capital they may,

or may not, already have acquired.

In this paper, we seek to explore what Bourdieu’s ideas imply about both the implicit

and explicit values that are used to justify the value of a science education. In doing so,

we draw on his notion of cultural capital, in particular, to argue how school science couldbetter contribute to the remediation of social inequalities.

For Bourdieu, cultural capital “represents the immanent structure of the social world,”

determining at any given moment what it is possible for any individual to achieve. The

varied forms of capital are similar in that each “takes time to accumulate and which, as a

potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form,

contains a tendency to persist in its being” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 46). The consequence is

that certain forms of cultural capital become entrenched, as those who possess such capital

either implicitly or explicitly defend its value. Indeed, Bourdieu argued that ultimately

certain groups within society legitimize the meanings that they seek to impose on others

through the structure and agencies of the formal education system. In education, what isimposed on students then “contributes towards reproducing the power relations” (Bourdieu

& Passeron, 1977, p. 31) that, in turn, are the basis of the power to impose them in the first

place. These values and meanings Bourdieu saw as essentially arbitrary and used the term

“a cultural arbitrary” as a label to show that they had no absolute justification, and rather,

that the dominant group in any society conceals the arbitrary aspects of their power. And,

as a belief in their intrinsic merit is the basis of their force, a corollary is that it is difficult

to challenge the view that these values have essential intrinsic merit. For instance, few

would question that an education in science is a good thing, a fact which makes it difficult

to critique the current form and content of what is commonly offered. The dominance

of any forms of cultural capital is then institutionalized in the form of examinations,qualifications, and certification by professional bodies. Significantly, for our argument,

1Bourdieu and Passeron’s conception of pedagogic action or work is a term that is applicable to any

attempt to educate another in any context, e.g., home, work, and not just schools.

Science Education, Vol. 97, No. 1, pp. 58–79 (2013)


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60 CLAUSSEN AND OSBORNE

it is access to these varied forms of institutionalized capital that determines the social

status of individuals, as their acquisition enables entry to privileged social classes (Jenkins,

2002).

Exactly what constitutes cultural capital is a product of the values and decisions of any group. For instance, expertise in the game of cricket has little value in the context of

American society and, conversely, expertise in baseball has little value in European society.

However, all societies are marked by one form that dominates and, in education, it is the

dominant “cultural arbitrary” that “stalks” the hallways of American schools (Apple, 1979).

Whether the dominant cultural capital has an intrinsic justification (Hirst & Peters, 1970),

or whether it is simply a product of a sociohistorical context (Young, 1971) is a long-

standing matter of debate. Bourdieu is situated very much in the former camp seeing it as

“the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977,

p. 5), which he argues is a form of “symbolic violence” as it enables the reproduction of

the existing structure of power relations in society “without resorting to external repressionor . . . physical coercion” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 36). In so doing, such pedagogic

acts deny the validity or value of other possible cultures. In the case of science, the cultural

arbitrary is exerted in two ways. First, the dominant scientific elite has ensured that the

form of science taught in most schools in most countries is one which is best suited to

educating the future scientist (a small minority) rather than the needs of the future citizen

(the overwhelming majority). This is achieved by the choices that are made about what

science has to offer: academic science versus science for citizenship (S. A. Brown, 1977;

Young, 1971), the exclusion of any history of science (Haywood, 1927; Matthews, 1994),

the underemphasis on applications and implications of science (Solomon & Aikenhead,

1994; Zeidler, Sadler, Simmons, & Howes, 2005), and the omission of any treatment

about how science works (Millar & Osborne, 1998)—all choices which do not harm the

education of the future scientist. The cumulative effect is to deny the validity of any other

cultural perspective on science—in particular one which might have more relevance to

women and students from other cultures. Granted such forms of science also alienate those

within the dominant elite who have little interest in becoming scientists, but such students

have a body of cultural capital that ensures access to alternative forms of institutionalized

capital.

The second manner in which symbolic violence is achieved is through the language

that science is communicated. As a form of discourse, science is highly reliant on forms

of language that are both functionally efficient (Fang, 2006) and utilize “academic lan-

guage” (Snow, 2010). Contrary to common belief, it is the academic language which is the

dominant barrier to comprehension of science and not its technical vocabulary—a finding

which is illustrated by the high correlation (.86) between reading and science scores in the

Programme of International Student Achievement (PISA) assessment (Kirsch et al., 2002).

As the habitus of students from the dominant cultural elite is one in which such language

is a common feature, these students have a privileged access to the institutionalized capital

that school science offers.

Despite the imposition of this form of science on so many and the alienation it has

produced, over the past 350 years scientists and science educators have been successful

with the argument that the knowledge that science offers is such an important element

of cultural capital that it should be an essential component of all students’ education(Dainton, 1968; Fensham, 1985; Millar & Osborne, 1998; National Academy of Sciences,

2010; National Academy of Sciences: Committee on Science Engineering and Public

Policy, 2005; Rutherford & Ahlgren, 1989). Indeed, so well have science educators suc-

ceeded with this argument that, along with mathematics and language arts, science forms

one of the triumvirate of subjects used in national or state tests of student performance.



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Science’s place at the curriculum high table has essentially become reified, to the extent

that some have even proposed that science education should be considered a civil right

(Tate, 2001).

Bourdieu and Passeron would argue, however, that science educators have managed totransform a cultivated need into a cultural need through “a prolonged process of inculcation”

(1977, p. 36), severing the need from any of the social conditions in which it was produced

and the arguments that led to its incorporation. Willard (1985) has similarly argued that

“values emanate from practice and become sanctified with time. The more they recede into

the background, the more taken for granted they become” (p. 444). In this case, the cultural

need that has been assiduously cultivated is the importance of science and technology to

society. Science education then becomes important as it is the means of ensuring the cultural

reproduction of science and, more importantly, as a means of signifying the value of science

within any society. Thus the elevated status of science education helps to sustain science

as part of the dominant “cultural arbitrary” such that it receives a significant element of society’s resources.

And, as the school science curriculum is a means of culturally reproducing scientists,

the determination of the curriculum has been very much dominated by the needs of the

professional scientist who are seen as the arbiters of what is worth knowing.2 From this

perspective, science education forms the foundation of a preprofessional training and is

conceptualized as a “pipeline” supplying the next generation of scientists who will be

producers of scientific knowledge. As a school subject, the value of science is explicitly

identified by the policy community in terms of its contribution to national growth and

any failure to recruit students is seen as a threat to the scientific and technological base

of society. Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) argue that this is essentially a “technocratic”

conception of education designed to produce “made to measure specialists according to

schedule” (p. 181) whose goals are dominated by the needs of the economic system,

and the contribution education makes to national growth rather than an education in and

about a cultural practice that has contributed significantly to our knowledge of the material

world.

Adopting the framework offered by Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital, as we shall

show, enables us to look with a different lens and ask different questions about what the

content and form of any formal education in science. To do so, we seek to examine here

the specific contributions that science education makes to a student’s cultural capital: in

particular, how that capital is acquired in the science classroom (or not), and how that

cultural capital will be relevant to their future cultural, academic, and professional lives.

We use this analysis to argue that the current form of science education fails to provide

scientific cultural capital to its students in three ways. These are (a) a failure to develop

an overview of the major achievements of Western science and its cultural value, (b) a

failure to contribute to developing the critical habits of mind that are valued highly both

professionally and culturally, and (c) a failure to communicate the extrinsic worth of a

science education for future employment both within and without science and to use this

as a means of student engagement and motivation. In making this argument, we do not

wish to argue that science education is a major vehicle for remediating social injustice,

taking the view that that is too much to ask of science education. Rather, we will argue

2For instance, the chair of the National Academy panel responsible for the production of the framework

for the next generation science standards was a leading theoretical physicist from Stanford University. The

current California State Standards were heavily influenced by a campaign led by the Nobel Prize winner

Glen Seaborg. And, it was the critical opinion of a leading scientist, Sir Richard Sykes, about the new

National Curriculum for England and Wales in 2006, which attracted major press attention.



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science education currently fails to recognize even the limited opportunities it does have

for remediating social injustice.

BOURDIEU’S NOTION OF CULTURAL CAPITAL

Bourdieu was interested in explaining from a social perspective, rather than a cognitive

or linguistic perspective, how two individuals of differing backgrounds, performing exactly

the same task, can achieve wildly differing results. His analysis focused on the resources—

or “capital”—that they brought to the task, arguing that it is such capital that determines

at any given moment what is or is not possible for individuals to achieve. Rather than the

outcome being solely one of luck or fortunate choice, capital is “what makes the games of

society . . . something other than a game of chance” (Bourdieu, 1986).

Bourdieu divided cultural capital into three distinct forms (Bourdieu, 1986; Jenkins,

2002; Webb et al., 2002). The embodied state of cultural capital, which includes “long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 47), takes time to acquire

and is transmitted from one person to another, most commonly from parent to child. In

the objectified state, it takes the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries,

instruments) and can easily be transmitted in its materiality. However, this form requires

embodied capital to fully appreciate and use it beneficially—for example, a first edition of

Darwin’s Origin of the Species has less value to someone who lacks an understanding of

why this is a seminal volume. Finally, cultural capital can exist in the institutionalized state,

in the form of academic or other formal qualifications, which are “a certificate of cultural

competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value

with respect to culture” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 50).

Bourdieu originally conceived of cultural capital as a way to explain the unequal academic

achievement of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds (Bourdieu, 1986). As

academic distinction is defined in terms of a set of cultural and arbitrary norms, it is not

surprising that students who possess the “right kind” of cultural capital (i.e., the forms

valued by schools), and a lot of it, achieve more in the education system (Apple, 1979;

Jenkins, 2002). From this perspective, schools are not passive in their role but rather actively

legitimize certain forms of knowledge and the distribution of this form of cultural capital.

“The very fact that certain traditions and normative “content” are construed as school

knowledge is prima facie evidence of their perceived legitimacy” (Apple, 1979)—and, we

would add—their privilege. In the science classroom, the dominant cultural arbitrary is the

requirement for all students to acquire a body of detailed knowledge of the concepts of

science whose salience is often not clear; to adopt unfamiliar genres of expression such

as the use of the passive voice; and to represent the world using imagined models, which

often appear to bear no necessary relation to everyday experience. “Violence,” in Bourdieu

and Passeron’s sense, is also done by ensuring that students who survive this experience

have neither a strong sense of what are the major explanatory ideas of the domain nor

the standard methods by which such ideas have been obtained and justified. For instance,

there is no discussion of peer review or double blind trials in nearly all school science

curricula and there is little sense conveyed that one of the major achievements of science is

its explanatory theories (Harré, 1984).

Not all cultural capital is acquired in schools, however. Bourdieu and Passeron divide theways of transferring cultural capital into three modes of “pedagogic action.” Informally, it is

transmitted through diffuse education, which occurs through social interactions. However,

it is family education that is viewed as the greatest source of any individual’s embodied

cultural capital—so much so that parents’ level of education is sometimes employed in

research as a convenient indicator of cultural capital (see, e.g., Adamuti-Trache & Andres,



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2008). The final means of transmission is through institutionalized education—school

(Bourdieu, 1986). Individuals acquire certain forms of cultural capital then as a consequence

of the schemata, sensibilities, dispositions, and tastes of the sociohistorical cultural contexts

that they inhabit. For Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), these elements were features of the distinctive “habitus” that are the values and ideology acquired within the family and

depend on the social grouping or class of which the child is a member. Because the habitus

in which some students reside is that of the dominant groups in society, such contexts

“predispose children unequally towards symbolic mastery of the operations implied as much

in mathematical demonstration as in decoding a work of art” (p. 43). As a consequence,

the “habitus acquired within the family forms the basis of the reception and assimilation of

the classroom message, and the habitus acquired at school conditions the level of reception

and degree of assimilation of the messages produced and diffused by the culture industry”

(p. 43).

However, because of the “clandestine circulation” of cultural capital (in the sense thatits value is rarely explicitly acknowledged) (Bourdieu, 1986), it is difficult to observe and

regulate and its role in reproducing the existing social structure often goes undetected

or ignored (Apple, 1979; Jenkins, 2002). One consequence is that a student’s display

of the dominant form of cultural capital is often mistaken in an educational setting for

natural aptitude (Eisner, 1992). The logical corollary is that a lack of cultural capital is

often inappropriately identified as a lack of natural ability. Indeed, Apple (1979) suggests

that cultural capital is such a powerful factor in the classroom partially because schools

commonly attempt to treat all students as equal when they are patently not. Rather, many

students are handicapped from the beginning.

Student resistance to the imposition of this cultural arbitrary can be seen in the comments

that students make about their experience of school science education:

The blast furnace, so when are you going to use a blast furnace? I mean, why do you need

to know about it? You’re not going to come across it ever. I mean look at the technology

today, we’ve gone onto cloning, I mean it’s a bit away off from the blast furnace now, so

why do you need to know it? (Osborne & Collins, 2001, p. 449)

How many carbon atoms are in something doesn’t bother you. You don’t walk down the

street and think, “I wonder how many carbon atoms are in that car,” or whatever, it just

doesn’t happen. (Osborne & Collins, 2000, p. 55).

Further evidence can be found in the negative correlation between attainment and interest

in both the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) (Ogura, 2006;

Avvisati & Vincent-Lancrin, in press) and PISA studies and in the high level of leakage

from the pipeline (Jacobs & Simpkins, 2006). For Bourdieu and Passeron, the low level of

technical efficiency of the system and alienation of many students is a price that science is

willing to pay. As for scientists, such failings are of little concern as long as the system is

functionally effective in providing a sufficient supply to reproduce a body of professional

scientists and sustain their position of privilege in society.

Bourdieu and Passeron’s notion of cultural capital provides an analytical lens, which

shows how this form of “symbolic violence” might be challenged or at the very leastalleviated. Second, as we will argue, an authoritative and unquestioning science educa-

tion serves those in power who see a knowledgeable, critical, and scientifically literate

populace as a threat to the existing social order. Naturally, our focus is on the institution-

alized form of transmission of cultural capital as this offers the greatest opportunities for



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the systematic provision of additional cultural capital to students as, for those individuals

whose habitus does not readily provide access to the dominant forms of cultural capital,

school can, and should be a vital means of access. From this perspective, any formal

education that fails to remediate for a lack of the dominant cultural capital in underprivi-leged students simply serves to perpetuate the status quo. As B. A. Brown (2006) points

out, social mobility without any exposure to the dominant forms of capital “would be

nearly impossible.” Remediating any imbalances, however, requires us to ask what kinds

of cultural capital does a science education offer and which are of critical value? This

question is also important as identifying what forms of cultural capital science educa-

tion affords is a means to establishing the more general worth of an education in science

as well as specific elements that might compensate for students’ lack of embodied capi-

tal. In short, how can the science classroom increase its students’ stock of this valuable

commodity?

THE CULTURAL CAPITAL OFFERED BY SCIENCE EDUCATION

In seeking to answer this question, we examine three elements of cultural capital that

school science could offer—the nature of the knowledge communicated within school

science, the critical habits of mind it fosters, and the information it provides about the value

of institutionalized capital for future employment.

The Nature of the Knowledge Communicated by School Science

From Bourdieu’s perspective, knowledge is a form of embodied capital. It enables the

individual to understand and engage in the discourse of the dominant groups within society.

What picture then does school science present of the knowledge that constitutes science

and how does it seek to convince its students of its value? Answering this question helps to

reveal the values implicit in the “cultural arbitrary” of what matters.

To date one of the most systematic and rigorous studies of what students experience in

school science has been conducted by Weiss, Pasley, Sean Smith, Banilower, and Heck

(2003). Using a stratified sample of 31 schools that were representative of the United

States as a whole, these researchers observed a total of 180 science lessons. Of these

lessons, only 11% had an explicit focus on science as inquiry varying from 2% in high

school to 15% in elementary schools. A mere 20% were rated strong on the criterion of

“students are intellectually engaged with important ideas relevant to the focus of the lesson,”

and in only 16% were teachers’ questioning techniques to enhance the development of

student thinking considered strong. The picture that emerges from this report is one of a

disjuncture between the rhetoric of policy documents, which emphasize the teaching of

science through inquiry, and the reality of classroom practice. For instance, many lessons

did not include any element of motivation; only 16% included the use of questioning, which

was likely to advance student thinking; and only 16% had a strong commitment to “sense

making.”

Interviews with the teachers explored their beliefs about effective instruction. For most

teachers, the major influence on their selection of content was the state- and district-level

policies. An analysis of such standards conducted by Schmidt, Wang, and McKnight (2005)suggests that they are dominated by content knowledge and, in the case of the United States,

reflects an ad hoc model of topic organization rather than any discipline-based structure.

Further support for this picture comes from research exploring the nature and role of

textbooks in school science. As Valverde, Bianchi, Wolfe, Schmidt, and Houang (2002)



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argue “textbooks help define school subjects as students experience them. They represent

school disciplines to students.” Self-reports from biology teachers, for instance, indicate

that about 50% of what is taught and over 70% of how it is taught is based on the textbook

(Weiss et al., 2003). Commonly, school science textbooks present science as consisting of alarge body of content with more new terms presented than a student might meet in a foreign

language course (Merzyn, 1987). Textbooks are dominated by exposition with an absence of

any justification for the claims that are made (Penney, Norris, Phillips, & Clark, 2003). Any

notion of how such knowledge has been obtained is normally covered in an introductory

chapter on “the scientific method”—a concept which has long been discredited (Bauer,

1992; Chiappetta & Fillman, 2007). Nor do the chapters state explicitly what questions

they answer or why they matter, leaving students to construct their own senses of the

significance and value of the knowledge (Kesidou & Roseman, 2002). Moreover, as Kesidou

and Roseman’s extensive analysis of nine widely used U.S. programs for teaching middle

school science showed, these text-based schemes “were particularly deficient in providingcoherent explanations of real-world phenomena using key science ideas” (p. 538).

What constitutes valued cultural capital in science is also communicated through the form

and nature of students’ assessments (Au, 2007; Weiss et al., 2003; Wilson & Bertenthal,

2005), particularly those that are high stakes (Lane, Parke, & Stone, 1998). Commonly

such tests emphasize recall at the expense of higher order thinking or extended projects

and other activities not emphasized by the test (Lane et al., 1998; Romberg, Zarinnia, &

Williams, 1989; Smith, Edelsky, Draper, Rottenberg, & Cherland, 1991). For example,

over two thirds of the questions on the California eighth-grade test make only the cognitive

demand of recall (MacPherson & Osborne, 2012). The consequence as Au has shown

is a curriculum, which is more teacher centered, less coherent, and more fragmented—a

feature which is confirmed by research exploring the student experience of science (Au,

2007; Lyons & Quinn, 2009; Osborne, Simon, & Collins, 2003). Absent are any attempts

to assess whether students have knowledge of the major explanatory ideas of science,

can construct basic explanatory accounts of phenomena, or engage in identifying flawed

reasoning.

The picture of Bourdieu’s “cultural arbitrary” that emerges from this body of research

is one of a curriculum full of details that lacks coherence—a knowledge not of its broad

overarching themes but of a large body of detailed facts. It is precisely this form of

knowledge that serves as an essential foundation for the professional scientist just as the

lawyer is required to have a detailed knowledge of case history or the doctor a detailed

knowledge of physiology. At its core, such an education is a reflection of a belief that the

function of science education is first and foremost a form of preprofessional training—a

model which has formed the foundation of science education for the past hundred years

(DeBoer, 1991) and, notwithstanding the rhetoric, a model which still endures. Despite a

litany of attempts to portray the achievements of science (Millar, 2006; Millar & Hunt,

2002; Rutherford, Holton, & Watson, 1970; Schwab, 1962), none of these innovations has

managed to take root as a mainstream form of science education. Thus, the conception

of presenting science as a process of inquiry with the goal of developing a scientifically

literate populace that would have a broad knowledge of the major explanatory themes of

science and knowledge of how science functions remains largely an aspiration rather than

a reality. In Bourdieu’s terms “symbolic violence” is enacted on the majority of the studentpopulation to preserve the power and cultural dominance of a scientific elite. The “cultural

arbitrary” is a deliberate choice to offer a curriculum overladen with information—an

experience captured by the following student reflection:



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It’s all crammed in, and you either take it all in or it goes in one ear and out the other. You

catch bits of it, then it gets confusing, then you put the wrong bits together and, if you don’t

understand it, the teachers can’t really understand why you haven’t grasped it. (Osborne &

Collins, 2001, p. 450)

What then might be a more valued form of embodied cultural capital? The most cogent

articulation of the contribution by science to an individual’s cultural capital has possibly

been made by Hirsch, who has attempted to define the basic elements of what every

American should know to be “culturally literate” (Hirsch, 1987). Hirsch contends that “all

human communities are founded upon specific shared information” (p. xv) and proposes the

concept of cultural literacy as a level of general knowledge that “lies above the everyday

levels of knowledge that everyone possesses and below the expert level known only to

specialists.” Hirsch attempted to convey his meaning by creating a list of terms that the

culturally literate individual should be familiar with. Some have seen this as an attempt toreify a dominant form of cultural capital—Bourdieu and Passeron’s “cultural arbitrary”—

others as an attempt to trivialize cultural knowledge by reducing it to a miscellany of facts.

Both, we would contend, are an incorrect reading of Hirsch who argued (a) that each of

these elements was not simply a definition but a focus for a whole network of interrelated

concepts (extensive knowledge) and (b) that rapid change in what aspects or features of

culture predominate is “no more possible in the sphere of national culture than in the sphere

of national language” (p. 91). In short, culture evolves only slowly and cannot readily be

remade by some act of common will of any minority cultural group. Rather it is essential for

schools to compensate for the “cultural deprivations” of students and ensure that students are

provided the basic knowledge and skills of the culturally literate individual. Delpit (2006),

for instance, makes a powerful argument that it is the responsibility of education to develop

“useful and usable knowledge which contributes to a students’ ability to communicate

effectively” (p. 18) within the context of the existing cultural arbitrary.

Hirsch asserts that “literate culture is the most democratic culture in our land: it excludes

nobody; it cuts across generations and social groups and classes; it is not usually one’s

first culture, but it should be everyone’s second, existing as it does beyond the narrow

spheres of family, neighborhood, and region” (1987, p. 21). Bourdieu’s notion of cultural

capital, however, provides a framework with which to challenge this claim. This literate

culture—the knowledge, facts, concepts, and ideas that Hirsch expects all to have—is the

cultural capital of some students’ habitus. These children grow up being read Dickens by

their parents, hearing about Adam and Eve in Sunday school, learning about plate tectonics

at the science center, and knowing not only that their aunt works with semiconductors

but what they are (all of which are on Hirsch’s list of concepts that literate Americans

should know). Thus, such capital is not evenly distributed. A healthy democracy, however,

is dependent on the capability of its institutional structures to identify both the valued forms

of cultural capital that exist and to ensure that all students are provided the opportunity to

acquire as much as possible. A culture is only democratic then to the extent that it provides

the social structures that support the acquisition of the most valued forms of cultural capital

by all its students regardless of ethnicity or social background.

Hirsch is important because his is one of the few systematic attempts that exists to

identify what it is that makes science an essential element of cultural capital. As Hirschargues, Modern Western science is “one of the noblest achievements of mankind” (Hirsch,

1987)—a consequence of the creativity and ingenuity that scientists have poured into their

work over the centuries. And, if this knowledge is part of the embodied cultural capital

that professional scientists and dominant elites hold, then ensuring that students develop

some understanding of the nature of this collective achievement should be a primary goal of



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science education. Yet, the epideictic celebration of the achievements of scientific endeavor

is virtually nonexistent within formal science education. From Bourdieu and Passeron’s

perspective, however, this is an explicit choice. Failure to communicate the worth and value

of the major explanatory ideas of science ensures that large numbers of young people arenever provided with the overarching framework, which might (a) help them make sense of

what they have experienced and (b) obtain a schematic overview, which would help them

to locate and evaluate the significance and value of advances in science and technology.

Conceiving of science education as a contribution to “cultural literacy” and the devel-

opment of individual capital, however, would mean seeing the goal of science education

first and foremost as an education—a contribution to an individual’s embodied capital

(Hirsch, 1987; Osborne & Collins, 2000). As such, its goal would be to provide students

with scientific knowledge, not primarily because they will be future scientists, nor because

such knowledge is useful in daily life, nor because it might enable them to contribute to

socioscientific decisions (though these may be valuable outcomes), but simply becausescientific knowledge is an essential means of access to the dominant groups within society.

General Scientific Skills As Cultural Capital

Cultural capital of an embodied nature takes the form not just of knowledge of a certain

kind but also as a set of valued skills and behaviors. Swidler explains this sense of cultural

capital as “more like a style or a set of skills or habits” (Swidler, 1986, p. 275). These skills

and habits can be both the traditional academic skills of literacy and numeracy as well

as “noncognitive” habits that are not usually assessed such as completing homework and

participating constructively in class. Such skills and habits have been shown to determine

school success and levels of educational and occupational attainment (Bowles & Gintis,

2002; Farkas, 2003). What contribution does school science make to the development of

such valued capabilities?

Potentially the science classroom offers an arena to develop certain such culturally valued

skills in students—in particular, the commitment to evidence as the basis of belief and an

analytical frame of mind, which seeks to identify patterns and causal interrelationships

(Kirschner, 1992; Osborne, 2010). In addition, it provides an environment in which to

enhance students’ capability to read and produce expository or technical text (Wellington

& Osborne, 2001)—the latter being a highly valued workplace skill that is a commonplace

feature in many contemporary professions. Yet over 30 years of research (Davies & Greene,

1984; Pearson, Moje, & Greenleaf, 2010; Wellington & Osborne, 2001) on the centrality

of reading and writing in science has failed to persuade the science education community

that teaching students how to read informational texts should be a core activity of science

despite the fact that the ability to construct meaning from text is the fundamental ability of

the scientifically literate individual (Norris & Phillips, 2003).

In Bourdieu’s terms, this lack of attention to reasoning and thinking skills is not surprising

as “the more completely [pedagogic work] succeeds in imposing misrecognition of the

dominant arbitrary” (1977, p. 40), the more effective it is at ensuring it reproduces “the

structure of power relations between the groups and classes.” If students do not acquire the

intellectual capabilities required to access, comprehend, and question the ideology of the

dominant classes, which are largely conveyed in such texts, then there is little chance thatthey will engage critically with science.

Evidence that the cultural habitus occupied by teachers of science does not value such

skills comes from an interview study with 39 teachers from five high school science and

history departments conducted by Donnelly (1999). Donnelly found that a majority of the

science teachers agreed that teaching content was a major goal of their teaching (indeed,



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this was the only aim that the majority of the science teachers agreed upon), whereas only

approximately 20% of the history teachers felt this was an important goal. In contrast, more

than 80% of the history teachers interviewed talked about teaching intellectual skills as

an important goal in their instruction. Donnelly concluded that science teachers tend “tolink relevance with ‘content’,” whereas history teachers, in contrast, link relevance with

skills, such as the ability to analyze historical data in critical fashion—a skill that enables

students to understand the modern world and deal appropriately with uncertainty. History

teachers, he argued, viewed content as “a vehicle for their work with children, rather than

an end in itself” (Donnelly, 1999). Further evidence of the lack of emphasis on critical

inquiry within school science comes from research which shows how teachers of physics

run tightly scripted lessons whose primary goal is to convey the truth about nature (Tesch

& Duit, 2004; Willems, 2007). Confirmation of this state of affairs can be seen in student

perceptions where, as described by one student, the distinction between history and science

is seen as in the following:

In history, I mean, certain events, you ask why they happen; sometimes they actually

backtrack to why it happened. I mean with science it’s just, “It happened, accept it, you

don’t need to know this until A3 level” (Osborne & Collins, 2001, p. 454).

The consequence is that science classrooms are often dominated by authoritative dialogue

(Mortimer & Scott, 2003). Studies suggest that opportunities for deliberative discourse

are minimal, occupying less than 2% of classroom time (Newton, Driver, & Osborne,

1999) and that teachers of science rarely press for causal understanding using questions as

a means of transmitting information and making knowledge public (Newton & Newton,

2000). As Ford (2008) points out, constructing scientific knowledge is a dialectic between

construction and critique. However, one of the features of school science is the absence of

critique (Driver, Newton, & Osborne, 2000; Ford, 2008; Kuhn, 2010). Attempts to change

teachers’ practice to one which places more emphasis on argumentation or inquiry have

only met with limited success (Luft, 2001; Martin & Hand, 2009; Simon, Erduran, &

Osborne, 2006). The consequence is that the student is never encouraged to scrutinize the

logical relations that exist between theory and evidence.

The ultimate irony is that what the scientist is valued for outside of science, like the

historian, is the disciplinary habits of mind which the practice of science develops—that is,

the analytic ability to make logically deductive arguments from simple premises, to identify

salient variables, patterns in data, numerical fluency, and the critical disposition of mindthat is the hallmark of the scientist (Ford, 2008; National Research Council, 2008; Rogers,

1948). Yet, internally, within science education, opportunities to develop such skills are

few and far between.

How then can the student develop the critical habits of mind for which science is valued if

there is no opportunity for its practice? From Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1977) perspective,

an education that did develop such skills would undermine “the conditions for its own

establishment and perpetuation” (p. 20) as it would provide the embodied capital necessary

to resist and critique the dominant cultural arbitrary including the traditional form of science

education. The lack of emphasis within contemporary science education on the development

of domain-general reasoning skills can best be seen as a squandered opportunity to endowstudents with embodied cultural capital—that is, ways of weighing evidence, the ability to

ask good questions, to model unfamiliar situations, communicate technical ideas, and argue

3A-level is the post-16 examination. Students in England, UK, study a minimum of three, and it is

broadly equivalent to the American Advanced Placement (AP) courses.



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from premises to a conclusion. An alternative interpretation is that the absence of critique

is simply a means of ensuring the unquestioned imposition of the “cultural arbitrary . . .

the reproduction of which contributes to the reproduction of the relations between groups

or classes” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 54).

Cultural Capital and Careers in and From Science

As we have argued earlier, deeply embedded in the rhetoric of science education, ever

since its inception, is Bourdieu and Passeron’s technocratic function that formal science

education serves as a pipeline to supply the next generation of science and engineering

professionals required to sustain an advanced technological society. Students, likewise,

value the institutional capital offered by science, in particular. In a survey of 15- and

16-year-old students in Australia, Lyons (2006) identified that students held four main

conceptions about school science: (1) Science is teacher centered and content focused, (2)the curriculum content is personally irrelevant and boring, (3) science is difficult, and (4)

physical science courses are primarily of strategic value in that they enhance the students’

university and career options. The first three conceptions support our argument that the

form of pedagogic action used within the science classroom is highly unappealing and

generates significant resistance. The last of these, however, is strongly suggestive that

students do value the institutionalized cultural capital that science offers rather than the

embodied form which teachers promote. Stokking (2000) too has found that the dominant

factor predicting the choice of physics as a subject of study was the perceived relevance for

future employment.

And indeed, when making decisions about future educational pathways and possible

careers, it is a knowledge of the forms of institutionalized cultural capital that count

that play a key role (Adamuti-Trache & Andres, 2008). However, students from different

socioeconomic backgrounds have access to “unequal knowledge about courses and the

careers they lead to [and] the cultural models which associate certain occupations and

certain educational options” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979, p. 13). Such knowledge is then

a valuable form of cultural capital, for “knowing the current and future worth of various

types of academic credentials is key in the transmission of cultural capital from parents to

their children” (Adamuti-Trache & Andres, 2008, p. 1576).

Some indication of the institutionalized value of science education comes from the fact

that many U.S. postsecondary institutions have basic science requirements for admission,

a fact that is rarely mentioned in science classrooms yet is highly relevant, particularly to

those students who lack the cultural capital needed to navigate the college entrance process.

Even when such requirements do not exist, as in the UK, science qualifications are seen

to have higher exchange value for college admission as the minimum grades required for

admission are lower for the sciences.

Yet, despite the evidence of the value placed by students on the institutional capital that

science offers and despite the fact that the dominant cultural arbitrary is one which sees

the major function of science education as ensuring the supply of individuals necessary to

sustain the scientific and technological base, little is done within school science to explain

the many career pathways that the study of science affords. For example, a search for the

word “career” in science curriculum documents from English-speaking nations or statesfound only the minimal references found in Table 1.

Given the motivational problems with engaging students (Lyons & Quinn, 2009; Osborne

et al., 2003; Schreiner & Sjøberg, 2007), it is puzzling that science curricula do not

promote the institutional capital that science offers (Foskett & Hemsley-Brown, 1997;

Jacobs & Simpkins, 2006; Munro & Elsom, 2000; Stagg, 2007). Moreover, as the outcome



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TABLE 1The Number of Times the Word “Career” Is Mentioned in the State or NationalScience Curriculum Documents in English-Speaking Countries

Nation/StateMentions of “Career” in Science Curriculum

Standard Documents

California 0

New York 0

Massachusetts 0

Michigan 0

Australian Science

Curriculum

“Recognising aspects of science, engineering and

technology within careers such as medicine, medical

technology, telecommunications, biomechanical

engineering, pharmacy and physiology.”

English NationalCurriculum “Career opportunities: The knowledge, skills andunderstanding developed through the study of science

are highly regarded by employers. Many career pathways

require qualifications in science, but science qualifications

do not necessarily lead to laboratory-based occupations.”

New Zealand

National

Curriculum

0

of formal education becomes increasingly high stakes, acquiring institutionalized cultural

capital becomes of ever-increasing importance for future employment (National Research

Council, 2008).

Part of the explanation for this lacuna may lie in the fact that only a minority of teachers

of science have ever been practicing engineers or scientists themselves: hence, they lack

the experiential knowledge necessary to illustrate the nature of work and careers in science

and technology. For instance, Munro and Elsom (2000) conducted a study using focus

group interviews with career advisors, a questionnaire survey of 155 career advisors and

six interviews with heads of science departments, science teachers, and group interviews

with students from widely varying schools. Their major findings, among others, were that

teachers of science did not perceive themselves as a source of career information; rather, this

was seen as the responsibility of career advisors. However, research with career advisors

would suggest that very few have a scientific background making them potentially even

less suited to offering advice about the nature of the working life of a science, technology,

engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professional (Stagg, 2007).

Moreover, as the school system is fundamentally pedagogically conservative, the lack

of emphasis on careers only needs to be addressed in times of crisis. While there are

certain professions, predominantly in the physical sciences and engineering, that are expe-

riencing shortage of supply, there is no overall crisis. Indeed, there is an ongoing debate

about whether any shortage of supply of scientists and engineers exists (Cyranoski, 2011;

Lowell, Salzman, Bernstein, & Henderson, 2009). Indeed, there is evidence that there is anoversupply of life science graduates (Teitelbaum, 2007).

For students whose family habitus lacks the cultural capital to understand the value

of science qualifications for future career pathways, providing such knowledge would go

some way to redressing the “symbolic violence” that they experience through much of their

science education. As Adumiti-Tranche and Andres (2008) point out,



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The lack of requisite credentials is simultaneously a direct and indirect form of exclu-

sion. Students who do not possess the prerequisites for entry into specific postsecondary

programmes are simply denied entry. However, unequal knowledge about the current and

future worth of academic credentials, which according to Bourdieu is one of the most valu-

able types of information transmitted through inherited cultural capital, may well be the

result of indirect forms of exclusion . . . . That is, students eliminate themselves from the full

range of educational opportunities or are relegated to less desirable academic programmes.

(p. 1562)

Emphasizing such knowledge in the science curriculum—information about the people,

professions, and positions that use the science the students are learning and how they can

enter into a wide variety of science-related careers—could also potentially improve stu-

dents’ motivation to learn science by enhancing students’ understanding of the institutional

cultural capital that science offers (Archer et al., 2010). Indeed, Lyons and Quinn’s findings

that Year-10 Australian students believe teachers to be the most influential figure on theirdecision to pursue the study of science (Lyons & Quinn, 2009), more than their parents or

a career advisor, shows that teachers are a key conduit for providing information about the

range of possibilities that science offers. By devoting what needs to be only a very small

fraction of a high school science class to the discussion of future careers, science educators

could provide their students with a significant element of cultural capital that many parents,

if not most, cannot provide. Moreover, it is this particular element of cultural capital—the

extrinsic value of science qualifications—which seems to be a major motivational influence

in sustaining student engagement. Students whose home and family backgrounds provide

such knowledge are thus doubly advantaged. Not only do they have a stronger understand-

ing of the true value of the institutional capital, but they cultural capital acquired outsideof school gives them better access to what is commonly perceived to be a difficult and

complex subject.

Moreover, given that a large body of research shows that, for the majority of students,

interest in pursuing a scientific careers is largely formed by age 14 (Ormerod & Duckworth,

1975; Tai, Liu, Maltese, & Fan, 2006), exploring the possible careers that science offers

solely in the high school curriculum might be too late. Developing an early understanding

of the benefits of science careers and the educational requirements that lead to them in

the middle school might help students to make more informed choices about the value of

the institutional capital that is attached to specific programs of study and, in particular, the

value that science offers.

SOURCES OF CULTURAL CAPITAL

The notion that science education is a source of cultural capital has only occasionally been

utilized in research. One of the most notable examples is Aikenhead, who presents a view

that students have to cross cultural borders in science class “from the subcultures of their

peers and family into the subcultures of science and school science” (Aikenhead, 1995).

What he offers then is a view of science education as a cultural practice, which enables the

acquisition of a distinct culture—the culture of science. And, if learning science is a process

of cultural acquisition, then the science classroom has its own valued cultural capital of “science’s norms, values, beliefs, expectations, and conventional actions (the subculture

of science),” which the student must attempt to make “a part of his or her personal world

to varying degrees” (p. 10). From Bourdieu’s perspective, what Aikenhead is portraying

is the acquisition of an embodied state of cultural capital. As Aikenhead points out, if

students enter the classroom acting and thinking in ways that fits with the subculture of



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science—for example, readily accepting facts from an authority figure, are intrinsically

motivated, possess sufficient self-efficacy to attempt challenges, and are able to delay

present gratification for future rewards—they will naturally be enculturated and perform

well. However, students for whom the subculture of science is generally at odds with theirpreexisting cultural capital will have to assimilate the subculture of science in its embodied

form, sometimes with much difficulty, if they are to acquire the institutionalized cultural

capital it offers (Brown, Revelles, & Kelly, 2005; Roseberry, Warren, & Conant, 1992).

Brown, Revelles, and Kelly (2005), for instance, point out that language and discourse are

a display of identity. Yet, acquiring new forms of language is not just a process of learning

a new language but also requires a willingness to develop a new, or alternate identity—a

process which involves a level of risk as the new form is both trialed and negotiated within

different social contexts (Archer et al., 2010). Hence for those whose “habitus” has not

already provided such capital, its acquisition is a considerable challenge.

The importance of external sources of cultural capital has most commonly been dis-cussed when evaluating student persistence through the science pipeline (Adamuti-Trache

& Andres, 2008; Lyons, 2006), where it is seen to play two distinct roles. The first is

as a recognition of parents’ attitudes and valuing of formal education. As Bourdieu and

Passeron assert, an educated parent has “the eye for a good investment which enables one

to get the best return on inherited cultural capital in the scholastic market or on scholastic

capital in the labour market” (1979). Second and more specifically, parents can provide

their children with science-related cultural capital in how they respond to science and bring

it into the home. For instance, Lyons (2006) offers the following example:

The provision of science related materials and knowledge by parents can also be seen asan endowment of cultural capital, in the sense that parents consider that these assets will

enhance their child’s education and, hopefully, their schooling outcomes. Likewise, parents’

use of scientific discourse at home is another form of cultural capital, which, if congruent

with the language and attitudes of teachers, can benefit students in their education. (p. 301)

These ways of talking about and interacting with science are forms of embodied cultural

capital that children acquire over time, through interacting with their parents and through

informal science education, such as the use of science kits and museum visits. Using

an analysis of a 10-year, longitudinal data set of 1055 respondents, Adamuti-Trache and

Andres found that those students whose parents had obtained college degrees were more

likely to enter STEM-related careers. Science classes in secondary school were seen as

“reliable strategies” or necessary requirements to enter the postsecondary system and were

thus often encouraged by parents as a form of institutionalized cultural capital (Adamuti-

Trache & Andres, 2008). This is particularly true of immigrant communities who recognize

certain scientific careers as a means of establishing credibility and status within their new

community (Archer et al., 2010).

Figure 1 shows a model proposed by Lyons that shows how the cultural capital that some

families hold explicitly supports students in the acquisition of scientific cultural capital and

indicates the likelihood of students choosing to persist in physical science subjects.

Although family education undoubtedly is a powerful mode of providing students with

the cultural capital that enables students to succeed in science, by attending to the possiblecareers the study of science offers, both formal and informal science education could

enhance the opportunity to acquire this vital element of cultural capital—an element which

the cultural habitus of many students’ lives does not provide. On the basis of such an

argument, some study and exploration of the range of careers that the study of science

offers should be an essential feature of the science curriculum. As the head of careers of



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Figure 1. A model proposed by Lyons illustrating how congruence between the cultures of school science and

family can lead to persistence in the physical sciences (2006).

one of the UK’s foremost science and technology universities has stated, all students need

to know at the very minimum that the three high school qualifications that make you most

employable are math, physics, and chemistry (Simpson, 2004).

Brown, Brown, and Jayakumar (2009) offer a powerful insight into how schools both can

provide and fail to provide significant cultural capital. In their study of the college-goingculture in a large urban area in California, they identified how “the students’ home culture

served as a driving force in shaping the culture of the institution” (p. 281). They showed

that the school and its counselors only provided limited information on careers and then,

predominantly to AP or honors students. Students found themselves reliant on their peers for

such information and the need to be proactive in seeking it out. The researchers concluded

that the school, its teachers, and its counselors served as “gatekeepers for determining

who ultimately [would] have access to valuable resources” (p. 296). Yet, the study also

showed how much students benefited from and appreciated the small amount of information

about careers that they obtained from teachers, reporting that students learn a lot from what

teachers’ “little life stories” and “what they say and what they have experienced.” The latterfinding is commensurate with the finding of Lyons and Quinn (2009) that identified teachers

as a significant source of career information. Given that relying on one’s parents to acquire

salient cultural capital for students from low-income families is, as Paredes (2011) argues,

“a hit and miss proposition” and then “mostly miss,” the role of the school as a source

of cultural capital becomes ever more important for underrepresented and underprivileged

students.

CONCLUSIONS AND LIMITATIONS TO THE SCIENCE CURRICULUM

Our analysis brings us to a position where we identify what we see as a twofold irony. Onthe one hand, those working as teachers of science value science as a domain of knowledge

for its intrinsic merits—the explanatory value that it has to offer of the material world

and the creative achievement that those explanatory accounts represent. Science, from this

perspective, is perceived as a body of knowledge that has freed society from the shackles of

received wisdom, answering questions not only about what we know but also about how we



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What then, can science education reasonably hope to influence? And furthermore, what

can the science classroom uniquely contribute to ameliorate such effects? Here, we would

suggest that Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is both empowering and humbling: It is

humbling because in the face of all the other influences on students both within and outsideof school, any meaningful contribution that science education can make to the cultural

capital of students will only be small; but it is also empowering because Bourdieu’s notions

offer a means of identifying those elements which are essential if science education is to

make a specific and well-targeted contribution to students’ cultural capital. Our argument

here has been that three emphases are necessary to breathe life into a subject which is

commonly perceived by students as a “miscellany of facts” (Cohen, 1952) consisting of

unequivocal and uncontested knowledge (Claxton, 1991). First, there needs to be more

emphasis on what the overarching big ideas of science are—Hirsch’s extensive knowledge.

Second, science education needs to recognize its role in developing the critical spirit of

the independent thinker—as a force for challenging orthodoxies not only within sciencebut without. By explicitly teaching these skills, and pointing out to students that they are

transferable to other domains, school science offers a means for students to see both the

intrinsic value of their science classes for their own thinking and the extrinsic value for

future employment. Third, it needs to sell to its perceived strengths, laying out to its students

the value of the institutionalized capital that it has to offer.

Moreover, our contention has been that school science fails to recognize the extrinsic

worth of a science education by omitting to tell students of the full panoply of careers

that the study of science offers both within science and external to science. This failure

contributes to perpetuating the extant social order and its attendant economic inequality: if

only students of a certain background are aware of the forms of institutionalized cultural

capital they can acquire (a degree or a job in a given field), then only those students will

embark on those career paths. Surely, one goal of science education, then, should be to

ensure that all students are enabled to see such possibilities?

Bourdieu thus helps us to reconceive of the worth of a science education and identify

important features of a curriculum that contributes to social equality. His concept of cultural

capital has allowed us to determine what a science education is capable of providing to its

students that is of intrinsic and extrinsic worth, both today and in their future regardless

of whether such knowledge will be used inside or outside of science. Thus, the theoretical

lens offered by Bourdieu and his collaborators helps to establish what the real value of a

science education is for students, teachers, and policy makers. More importantly, it helps

to identify why the failure to ask what is the cultural capital that science education offers

its students has led to a set of emphases which have no apparent value for many of today’s

young people. In short, Bourdieu’s ideas explain why formal science education has sold

itself short, overvaluing what does not count while undervaluing, neglecting, or omitting

what does count—and ultimately misrepresenting the value of an education in science.

We are grateful to anonymous reviewers whose comments have helped to refine and improve the

arguments in this paper. In addition, work conducted for this paper was partially funded by the UK

Economic and Social Research Council, Grant No. RES-179-25-0008.

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Bourdieu's Notion of Cultural Capital and Its Implications for the Science Curriculum

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