Bourdieu’s Notion of Cultural Capital and Its Implications

ScienceEducation

ISSUES AND TRENDS

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

STEPHANIE CLAUSSEN,1 JONATHAN OSBORNE2

1Department of Electrical Engineering and 2Graduate School of Education, StanfordUniversity, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

Received 18 July 2011; accepted 22 August 2012DOI 10.1002/sce.21040Published online 14 December 2012 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital has significantvalue 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 boththe intrinsic value of scientific knowledge and its extrinsic value for future employment.This analysis suggests that science education misses three opportunities to establish itsvalue to its students and the wider public. First, science education commonly has a poorunderstanding of the nature of embodied capital that it offers, failing to communicate thecultural achievement that science represents. Second, it fails to see itself as a means ofdeveloping 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 generationof 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 thevalue that science qualifications have for future employment. Bourdieu’s concept that theprimary function of education is to sustain the culture and privilege of the dominant groupsin society offers a lens that helps to identify how and why these apparent contradictionsexist. Drawing on Bourdieu’s ideas, we develop a perspective to critique current practiceand identify the possible contributions science education might make to remediating socialinjustice. C© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 97:58–79, 2013

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

C© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

CULTURAL CAPITAL AND THE SCIENCE CURRICULUM 59

INTRODUCTION

During his lifetime, the Frenchman Pierre Bourdieu tackled a number of seeminglyeclectic issues, which, when combined, paint a picture of how individuals conduct theirlives 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 aunique perspective from which to analyze the function of education. Bourdieu conceivesof “habitus” as a set of social and cultural practices, values, and dispositions that arecharacterized by the ways social groups interact with their members; whereas “culturalcapital” is the knowledge, skills, and behaviors that are transmitted to an individual withintheir sociocultural context through pedagogic action1 (Bourdieu, 1986), in particular by thefamily. Formal education is important because it can be viewed as an academic market forthe distribution of cultural capital: Those who enter the classroom with sufficient culturalcapital of the appropriate, dominant type—capital that fits well with the discourse and valuesof 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 capitalin 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 theschool, or who lack it altogether, are at a distinct disadvantage. One of the challenges ofeducation in general, and science education in particular, is how to increase a student’sstock 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 implicitand 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. Thevaried forms of capital are similar in that each “takes time to accumulate and which, as apotential 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 isthat certain forms of cultural capital become entrenched, as those who possess such capitaleither implicitly or explicitly defend its value. Indeed, Bourdieu argued that ultimatelycertain groups within society legitimize the meanings that they seek to impose on othersthrough 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 firstplace. 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 difficultto challenge the view that these values have essential intrinsic merit. For instance, fewwould question that an education in science is a good thing, a fact which makes it difficultto critique the current form and content of what is commonly offered. The dominanceof 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 anyattempt to educate another in any context, e.g., home, work, and not just schools.

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

60 CLAUSSEN AND OSBORNE

it is access to these varied forms of institutionalized capital that determines the socialstatus 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 ofany group. For instance, expertise in the game of cricket has little value in the context ofAmerican 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 thedominant “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 ofthe existing structure of power relations in society “without resorting to external repressionor . . . physical coercion” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 36). In so doing, such pedagogicacts deny the validity or value of other possible cultures. In the case of science, the culturalarbitrary is exerted in two ways. First, the dominant scientific elite has ensured that theform of science taught in most schools in most countries is one which is best suited toeducating 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 whatscience 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 treatmentabout how science works (Millar & Osborne, 1998)—all choices which do not harm theeducation of the future scientist. The cumulative effect is to deny the validity of any othercultural perspective on science—in particular one which might have more relevance towomen and students from other cultures. Granted such forms of science also alienate thosewithin the dominant elite who have little interest in becoming scientists, but such studentshave a body of cultural capital that ensures access to alternative forms of institutionalizedcapital.

The second manner in which symbolic violence is achieved is through the languagethat science is communicated. As a form of discourse, science is highly reliant on formsof 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 thedominant barrier to comprehension of science and not its technical vocabulary—a findingwhich is illustrated by the high correlation (.86) between reading and science scores in theProgramme 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 languageis a common feature, these students have a privileged access to the institutionalized capitalthat school science offers.

Despite the imposition of this form of science on so many and the alienation it hasproduced, over the past 350 years scientists and science educators have been successfulwith the argument that the knowledge that science offers is such an important elementof 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 PublicPolicy, 2005; Rutherford & Ahlgren, 1989). Indeed, so well have science educators suc-ceeded with this argument that, along with mathematics and language arts, science formsone of the triumvirate of subjects used in national or state tests of student performance.



Science’s place at the curriculum high table has essentially become reified, to the extentthat 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 producedand 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 intothe background, the more taken for granted they become” (p. 444). In this case, the culturalneed that has been assiduously cultivated is the importance of science and technology tosociety. Science education then becomes important as it is the means of ensuring the culturalreproduction of science and, more importantly, as a means of signifying the value of sciencewithin any society. Thus the elevated status of science education helps to sustain scienceas part of the dominant “cultural arbitrary” such that it receives a significant element ofsociety’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 theprofessional scientist who are seen as the arbiters of what is worth knowing.2 From thisperspective, science education forms the foundation of a preprofessional training and isconceptualized as a “pipeline” supplying the next generation of scientists who will beproducers of scientific knowledge. As a school subject, the value of science is explicitlyidentified by the policy community in terms of its contribution to national growth andany failure to recruit students is seen as a threat to the scientific and technological baseof society. Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) argue that this is essentially a “technocratic”conception of education designed to produce “made to measure specialists according toschedule” (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 andabout a cultural practice that has contributed significantly to our knowledge of the materialworld.

Adopting the framework offered by Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital, as we shallshow, enables us to look with a different lens and ask different questions about what thecontent and form of any formal education in science. To do so, we seek to examine herethe specific contributions that science education makes to a student’s cultural capital: inparticular, how that capital is acquired in the science classroom (or not), and how thatcultural 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 providescientific cultural capital to its students in three ways. These are (a) a failure to developan overview of the major achievements of Western science and its cultural value, (b) afailure to contribute to developing the critical habits of mind that are valued highly bothprofessionally and culturally, and (c) a failure to communicate the extrinsic worth of ascience education for future employment both within and without science and to use thisas a means of student engagement and motivation. In making this argument, we do notwish 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 frameworkfor the next generation science standards was a leading theoretical physicist from Stanford University. Thecurrent California State Standards were heavily influenced by a campaign led by the Nobel Prize winnerGlen Seaborg. And, it was the critical opinion of a leading scientist, Sir Richard Sykes, about the newNational Curriculum for England and Wales in 2006, which attracted major press attention.



science education currently fails to recognize even the limited opportunities it does havefor remediating social injustice.

BOURDIEU’S NOTION OF CULTURAL CAPITAL

Bourdieu was interested in explaining from a social perspective, rather than a cognitiveor linguistic perspective, how two individuals of differing backgrounds, performing exactlythe 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 determinesat any given moment what is or is not possible for individuals to achieve. Rather than theoutcome being solely one of luck or fortunate choice, capital is “what makes the games ofsociety . . . 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 acquireand is transmitted from one person to another, most commonly from parent to child. Inthe objectified state, it takes the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries,instruments) and can easily be transmitted in its materiality. However, this form requiresembodied capital to fully appreciate and use it beneficially—for example, a first edition ofDarwin’s Origin of the Species has less value to someone who lacks an understanding ofwhy 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 culturalcompetence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed valuewith respect to culture” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 50).

Bourdieu originally conceived of cultural capital as a way to explain the unequal academicachievement of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds (Bourdieu, 1986). Asacademic distinction is defined in terms of a set of cultural and arbitrary norms, it is notsurprising that students who possess the “right kind” of cultural capital (i.e., the formsvalued 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 activelylegitimize 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 schoolknowledge is prima facie evidence of their perceived legitimacy” (Apple, 1979)—and, wewould add—their privilege. In the science classroom, the dominant cultural arbitrary is therequirement for all students to acquire a body of detailed knowledge of the concepts ofscience whose salience is often not clear; to adopt unfamiliar genres of expression suchas the use of the passive voice; and to represent the world using imagined models, whichoften appear to bear no necessary relation to everyday experience. “Violence,” in Bourdieuand Passeron’s sense, is also done by ensuring that students who survive this experiencehave neither a strong sense of what are the major explanatory ideas of the domain northe 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 sciencecurricula and there is little sense conveyed that one of the major achievements of science isits explanatory theories (Harre, 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 istransmitted through diffuse education, which occurs through social interactions. However,it is family education that is viewed as the greatest source of any individual’s embodiedcultural capital—so much so that parents’ level of education is sometimes employed inresearch as a convenient indicator of cultural capital (see, e.g., Adamuti-Trache & Andres,



2008). The final means of transmission is through institutionalized education—school(Bourdieu, 1986). Individuals acquire certain forms of cultural capital then as a consequenceof the schemata, sensibilities, dispositions, and tastes of the sociohistorical cultural contextsthat they inhabit. For Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), these elements were features ofthe distinctive “habitus” that are the values and ideology acquired within the family anddepend on the social grouping or class of which the child is a member. Because the habitusin 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 muchin 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 ofthe classroom message, and the habitus acquired at school conditions the level of receptionand 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 andregulate and its role in reproducing the existing social structure often goes undetectedor ignored (Apple, 1979; Jenkins, 2002). One consequence is that a student’s displayof the dominant form of cultural capital is often mistaken in an educational setting fornatural aptitude (Eisner, 1992). The logical corollary is that a lack of cultural capital isoften inappropriately identified as a lack of natural ability. Indeed, Apple (1979) suggeststhat cultural capital is such a powerful factor in the classroom partially because schoolscommonly attempt to treat all students as equal when they are patently not. Rather, manystudents are handicapped from the beginning.

Student resistance to the imposition of this cultural arbitrary can be seen in the commentsthat 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 needto know about it? You’re not going to come across it ever. I mean look at the technologytoday, we’ve gone onto cloning, I mean it’s a bit away off from the blast furnace now, sowhy 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 thestreet and think, “I wonder how many carbon atoms are in that car,” or whatever, it justdoesn’t happen. (Osborne & Collins, 2000, p. 55).

Further evidence can be found in the negative correlation between attainment and interestin 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 leakagefrom the pipeline (Jacobs & Simpkins, 2006). For Bourdieu and Passeron, the low level oftechnical efficiency of the system and alienation of many students is a price that science iswilling to pay. As for scientists, such failings are of little concern as long as the system isfunctionally effective in providing a sufficient supply to reproduce a body of professionalscientists and sustain their position of privilege in society.

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



the systematic provision of additional cultural capital to students as, for those individualswhose 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 formaleducation 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) pointsout, social mobility without any exposure to the dominant forms of capital “would benearly impossible.” Remediating any imbalances, however, requires us to ask what kindsof cultural capital does a science education offer and which are of critical value? Thisquestion 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 scienceas 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 valuablecommodity?

THE CULTURAL CAPITAL OFFERED BY SCIENCE EDUCATION

In seeking to answer this question, we examine three elements of cultural capital thatschool science could offer—the nature of the knowledge communicated within schoolscience, the critical habits of mind it fosters, and the information it provides about the valueof 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 theindividual 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 scienceand how does it seek to convince its students of its value? Answering this question helps toreveal the values implicit in the “cultural arbitrary” of what matters.

To date one of the most systematic and rigorous studies of what students experience inschool 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 UnitedStates as a whole, these researchers observed a total of 180 science lessons. Of theselessons, only 11% had an explicit focus on science as inquiry varying from 2% in highschool 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 ofstudent thinking considered strong. The picture that emerges from this report is one of adisjuncture between the rhetoric of policy documents, which emphasize the teaching ofscience through inquiry, and the reality of classroom practice. For instance, many lessonsdid not include any element of motivation; only 16% included the use of questioning, whichwas likely to advance student thinking; and only 16% had a strong commitment to “sensemaking.”

Interviews with the teachers explored their beliefs about effective instruction. For mostteachers, the major influence on their selection of content was the state- and district-levelpolicies. 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 oftextbooks in school science. As Valverde, Bianchi, Wolfe, Schmidt, and Houang (2002)



argue “textbooks help define school subjects as students experience them. They representschool disciplines to students.” Self-reports from biology teachers, for instance, indicatethat 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 foreignlanguage course (Merzyn, 1987). Textbooks are dominated by exposition with an absence ofany justification for the claims that are made (Penney, Norris, Phillips, & Clark, 2003). Anynotion of how such knowledge has been obtained is normally covered in an introductorychapter on “the scientific method”—a concept which has long been discredited (Bauer,1992; Chiappetta & Fillman, 2007). Nor do the chapters state explicitly what questionsthey answer or why they matter, leaving students to construct their own senses of thesignificance and value of the knowledge (Kesidou & Roseman, 2002). Moreover, as Kesidouand Roseman’s extensive analysis of nine widely used U.S. programs for teaching middleschool 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 formand nature of students’ assessments (Au, 2007; Weiss et al., 2003; Wilson & Bertenthal,2005), particularly those that are high stakes (Lane, Parke, & Stone, 1998). Commonlysuch tests emphasize recall at the expense of higher order thinking or extended projectsand 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 cognitivedemand of recall (MacPherson & Osborne, 2012). The consequence as Au has shownis a curriculum, which is more teacher centered, less coherent, and more fragmented—afeature which is confirmed by research exploring the student experience of science (Au,2007; Lyons & Quinn, 2009; Osborne, Simon, & Collins, 2003). Absent are any attemptsto assess whether students have knowledge of the major explanatory ideas of science,can construct basic explanatory accounts of phenomena, or engage in identifying flawedreasoning.

The picture of Bourdieu’s “cultural arbitrary” that emerges from this body of researchis one of a curriculum full of details that lacks coherence—a knowledge not of its broadoverarching themes but of a large body of detailed facts. It is precisely this form ofknowledge that serves as an essential foundation for the professional scientist just as thelawyer is required to have a detailed knowledge of case history or the doctor a detailedknowledge of physiology. At its core, such an education is a reflection of a belief that thefunction of science education is first and foremost a form of preprofessional training—amodel 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 alitany of attempts to portray the achievements of science (Millar, 2006; Millar & Hunt,2002; Rutherford, Holton, & Watson, 1970; Schwab, 1962), none of these innovations hasmanaged to take root as a mainstream form of science education. Thus, the conceptionof presenting science as a process of inquiry with the goal of developing a scientificallyliterate populace that would have a broad knowledge of the major explanatory themes ofscience and knowledge of how science functions remains largely an aspiration rather thana 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 “culturalarbitrary” is a deliberate choice to offer a curriculum overladen with information—anexperience captured by the following student reflection:



It’s all crammed in, and you either take it all in or it goes in one ear and out the other. Youcatch bits of it, then it gets confusing, then you put the wrong bits together and, if you don’tunderstand 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 cogentarticulation of the contribution by science to an individual’s cultural capital has possiblybeen made by Hirsch, who has attempted to define the basic elements of what everyAmerican should know to be “culturally literate” (Hirsch, 1987). Hirsch contends that “allhuman communities are founded upon specific shared information” (p. xv) and proposes theconcept of cultural literacy as a level of general knowledge that “lies above the everydaylevels of knowledge that everyone possesses and below the expert level known only tospecialists.” Hirsch attempted to convey his meaning by creating a list of terms that theculturally 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 ofthese elements was not simply a definition but a focus for a whole network of interrelatedconcepts (extensive knowledge) and (b) that rapid change in what aspects or features ofculture predominate is “no more possible in the sphere of national culture than in the sphereof national language” (p. 91). In short, culture evolves only slowly and cannot readily beremade by some act of common will of any minority cultural group. Rather it is essential forschools to compensate for the “cultural deprivations” of students and ensure that students areprovided 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 communicateeffectively” (p. 18) within the context of the existing cultural arbitrary.

Hirsch asserts that “literate culture is the most democratic culture in our land: it excludesnobody; it cuts across generations and social groups and classes; it is not usually one’sfirst culture, but it should be everyone’s second, existing as it does beyond the narrowspheres of family, neighborhood, and region” (1987, p. 21). Bourdieu’s notion of culturalcapital, however, provides a framework with which to challenge this claim. This literateculture—the knowledge, facts, concepts, and ideas that Hirsch expects all to have—is thecultural capital of some students’ habitus. These children grow up being read Dickens bytheir parents, hearing about Adam and Eve in Sunday school, learning about plate tectonicsat the science center, and knowing not only that their aunt works with semiconductorsbut what they are (all of which are on Hirsch’s list of concepts that literate Americansshould 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 formsof cultural capital that exist and to ensure that all students are provided the opportunity toacquire as much as possible. A culture is only democratic then to the extent that it providesthe social structures that support the acquisition of the most valued forms of cultural capitalby all its students regardless of ethnicity or social background.

Hirsch is important because his is one of the few systematic attempts that exists toidentify 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 theirwork over the centuries. And, if this knowledge is part of the embodied cultural capitalthat professional scientists and dominant elites hold, then ensuring that students developsome understanding of the nature of this collective achievement should be a primary goal of



science education. Yet, the epideictic celebration of the achievements of scientific endeavoris virtually nonexistent within formal science education. From Bourdieu and Passeron’sperspective, however, this is an explicit choice. Failure to communicate the worth and valueof 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 ofwhat they have experienced and (b) obtain a schematic overview, which would help themto 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 educationfirst 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 studentswith scientific knowledge, not primarily because they will be future scientists, nor becausesuch knowledge is useful in daily life, nor because it might enable them to contribute tosocioscientific 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 certainkind but also as a set of valued skills and behaviors. Swidler explains this sense of culturalcapital as “more like a style or a set of skills or habits” (Swidler, 1986, p. 275). These skillsand habits can be both the traditional academic skills of literacy and numeracy as wellas “noncognitive” habits that are not usually assessed such as completing homework andparticipating constructively in class. Such skills and habits have been shown to determineschool success and levels of educational and occupational attainment (Bowles & Gintis,2002; Farkas, 2003). What contribution does school science make to the development ofsuch valued capabilities?

Potentially the science classroom offers an arena to develop certain such culturally valuedskills in students—in particular, the commitment to evidence as the basis of belief and ananalytical frame of mind, which seeks to identify patterns and causal interrelationships(Kirschner, 1992; Osborne, 2010). In addition, it provides an environment in which toenhance students’ capability to read and produce expository or technical text (Wellington& Osborne, 2001)—the latter being a highly valued workplace skill that is a commonplacefeature in many contemporary professions. Yet over 30 years of research (Davies & Greene,1984; Pearson, Moje, & Greenleaf, 2010; Wellington & Osborne, 2001) on the centralityof reading and writing in science has failed to persuade the science education communitythat teaching students how to read informational texts should be a core activity of sciencedespite the fact that the ability to construct meaning from text is the fundamental ability ofthe scientifically literate individual (Norris & Phillips, 2003).

In Bourdieu’s terms, this lack of attention to reasoning and thinking skills is not surprisingas “the more completely [pedagogic work] succeeds in imposing misrecognition of thedominant arbitrary” (1977, p. 40), the more effective it is at ensuring it reproduces “thestructure of power relations between the groups and classes.” If students do not acquire theintellectual capabilities required to access, comprehend, and question the ideology of thedominant 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 suchskills comes from an interview study with 39 teachers from five high school science andhistory departments conducted by Donnelly (1999). Donnelly found that a majority of thescience teachers agreed that teaching content was a major goal of their teaching (indeed,



this was the only aim that the majority of the science teachers agreed upon), whereas onlyapproximately 20% of the history teachers felt this was an important goal. In contrast, morethan 80% of the history teachers interviewed talked about teaching intellectual skills asan important goal in their instruction. Donnelly concluded that science teachers tend “tolink relevance with ‘content’,” whereas history teachers, in contrast, link relevance withskills, such as the ability to analyze historical data in critical fashion—a skill that enablesstudents to understand the modern world and deal appropriately with uncertainty. Historyteachers, he argued, viewed content as “a vehicle for their work with children, rather thanan end in itself” (Donnelly, 1999). Further evidence of the lack of emphasis on criticalinquiry within school science comes from research which shows how teachers of physicsrun 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 studentperceptions where, as described by one student, the distinction between history and scienceis seen as in the following:

In history, I mean, certain events, you ask why they happen; sometimes they actuallybacktrack to why it happened. I mean with science it’s just, “It happened, accept it, youdon’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 discourseare minimal, occupying less than 2% of classroom time (Newton, Driver, & Osborne,1999) and that teachers of science rarely press for causal understanding using questions asa means of transmitting information and making knowledge public (Newton & Newton,2000). As Ford (2008) points out, constructing scientific knowledge is a dialectic betweenconstruction and critique. However, one of the features of school science is the absence ofcritique (Driver, Newton, & Osborne, 2000; Ford, 2008; Kuhn, 2010). Attempts to changeteachers’ practice to one which places more emphasis on argumentation or inquiry haveonly met with limited success (Luft, 2001; Martin & Hand, 2009; Simon, Erduran, &Osborne, 2006). The consequence is that the student is never encouraged to scrutinize thelogical relations that exist between theory and evidence.

The ultimate irony is that what the scientist is valued for outside of science, like thehistorian, 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 identifysalient 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 arefew and far between.

How then can the student develop the critical habits of mind for which science is valued ifthere 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 ownestablishment and perpetuation” (p. 20) as it would provide the embodied capital necessaryto resist and critique the dominant cultural arbitrary including the traditional form of scienceeducation. The lack of emphasis within contemporary science education on the developmentof 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 toask 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 isbroadly equivalent to the American Advanced Placement (AP) courses.



from premises to a conclusion. An alternative interpretation is that the absence of critiqueis simply a means of ensuring the unquestioned imposition of the “cultural arbitrary . . .the reproduction of which contributes to the reproduction of the relations between groupsor 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, eversince its inception, is Bourdieu and Passeron’s technocratic function that formal scienceeducation serves as a pipeline to supply the next generation of science and engineeringprofessionals required to sustain an advanced technological society. Students, likewise,value the institutional capital offered by science, in particular. In a survey of 15- and16-year-old students in Australia, Lyons (2006) identified that students held four mainconceptions 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 theform of pedagogic action used within the science classroom is highly unappealing andgenerates significant resistance. The last of these, however, is strongly suggestive thatstudents do value the institutionalized cultural capital that science offers rather than theembodied form which teachers promote. Stokking (2000) too has found that the dominantfactor predicting the choice of physics as a subject of study was the perceived relevance forfuture employment.

And indeed, when making decisions about future educational pathways and possiblecareers, it is a knowledge of the forms of institutionalized cultural capital that countthat play a key role (Adamuti-Trache & Andres, 2008). However, students from differentsocioeconomic backgrounds have access to “unequal knowledge about courses and thecareers they lead to [and] the cultural models which associate certain occupations andcertain educational options” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979, p. 13). Such knowledge is thena valuable form of cultural capital, for “knowing the current and future worth of varioustypes of academic credentials is key in the transmission of cultural capital from parents totheir children” (Adamuti-Trache & Andres, 2008, p. 1576).

Some indication of the institutionalized value of science education comes from the factthat 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 tothose 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 seento have higher exchange value for college admission as the minimum grades required foradmission are lower for the sciences.

Yet, despite the evidence of the value placed by students on the institutional capital thatscience offers and despite the fact that the dominant cultural arbitrary is one which seesthe major function of science education as ensuring the supply of individuals necessary tosustain the scientific and technological base, little is done within school science to explainthe many career pathways that the study of science affords. For example, a search for theword “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; Osborneet al., 2003; Schreiner & Sjøberg, 2007), it is puzzling that science curricula do notpromote the institutional capital that science offers (Foskett & Hemsley-Brown, 1997;Jacobs & Simpkins, 2006; Munro & Elsom, 2000; Stagg, 2007). Moreover, as the outcome



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 0New York 0Massachusetts 0Michigan 0Australian Science

Curriculum“Recognising aspects of science, engineering and

technology within careers such as medicine, medicaltechnology, telecommunications, biomechanicalengineering, pharmacy and physiology.”

English NationalCurriculum

“Career opportunities: The knowledge, skills andunderstanding developed through the study of scienceare highly regarded by employers. Many career pathwaysrequire qualifications in science, but science qualificationsdo not necessarily lead to laboratory-based occupations.”

New ZealandNationalCurriculum

0

of formal education becomes increasingly high stakes, acquiring institutionalized culturalcapital becomes of ever-increasing importance for future employment (National ResearchCouncil, 2008).

Part of the explanation for this lacuna may lie in the fact that only a minority of teachersof science have ever been practicing engineers or scientists themselves: hence, they lackthe experiential knowledge necessary to illustrate the nature of work and careers in scienceand technology. For instance, Munro and Elsom (2000) conducted a study using focusgroup interviews with career advisors, a questionnaire survey of 155 career advisors andsix interviews with heads of science departments, science teachers, and group interviewswith students from widely varying schools. Their major findings, among others, were thatteachers of science did not perceive themselves as a source of career information; rather, thiswas seen as the responsibility of career advisors. However, research with career advisorswould suggest that very few have a scientific background making them potentially evenless 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 lackof emphasis on careers only needs to be addressed in times of crisis. While there arecertain 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 debateabout 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 valueof science qualifications for future career pathways, providing such knowledge would gosome way to redressing the “symbolic violence” that they experience through much of theirscience education. As Adumiti-Tranche and Andres (2008) point out,



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 postsecondaryprogrammes are simply denied entry. However, unequal knowledge about the current andfuture 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 theresult of indirect forms of exclusion . . . . That is, students eliminate themselves from the fullrange 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 canenter into a wide variety of science-related careers—could also potentially improve stu-dents’ motivation to learn science by enhancing students’ understanding of the institutionalcultural capital that science offers (Archer et al., 2010). Indeed, Lyons and Quinn’s findingsthat 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 ora career advisor, shows that teachers are a key conduit for providing information about therange of possibilities that science offers. By devoting what needs to be only a very smallfraction of a high school science class to the discussion of future careers, science educatorscould 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—theextrinsic value of science qualifications—which seems to be a major motivational influencein sustaining student engagement. Students whose home and family backgrounds providesuch 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 andcomplex 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 offerssolely in the high school curriculum might be too late. Developing an early understandingof the benefits of science careers and the educational requirements that lead to them inthe middle school might help students to make more informed choices about the value ofthe institutional capital that is attached to specific programs of study and, in particular, thevalue that science offers.

SOURCES OF CULTURAL CAPITAL

The notion that science education is a source of cultural capital has only occasionally beenutilized in research. One of the most notable examples is Aikenhead, who presents a viewthat students have to cross cultural borders in science class “from the subcultures of theirpeers 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 theacquisition of a distinct culture—the culture of science. And, if learning science is a processof cultural acquisition, then the science classroom has its own valued cultural capital of“science’s norms, values, beliefs, expectations, and conventional actions (the subcultureof science),” which the student must attempt to make “a part of his or her personal worldto varying degrees” (p. 10). From Bourdieu’s perspective, what Aikenhead is portrayingis the acquisition of an embodied state of cultural capital. As Aikenhead points out, ifstudents enter the classroom acting and thinking in ways that fits with the subculture of



science—for example, readily accepting facts from an authority figure, are intrinsicallymotivated, possess sufficient self-efficacy to attempt challenges, and are able to delaypresent gratification for future rewards—they will naturally be enculturated and performwell. 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 embodiedform, sometimes with much difficulty, if they are to acquire the institutionalized culturalcapital it offers (Brown, Revelles, & Kelly, 2005; Roseberry, Warren, & Conant, 1992).Brown, Revelles, and Kelly (2005), for instance, point out that language and discourse area display of identity. Yet, acquiring new forms of language is not just a process of learninga new language but also requires a willingness to develop a new, or alternate identity—aprocess which involves a level of risk as the new form is both trialed and negotiated withindifferent social contexts (Archer et al., 2010). Hence for those whose “habitus” has notalready 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 isas a recognition of parents’ attitudes and valuing of formal education. As Bourdieu andPasseron assert, an educated parent has “the eye for a good investment which enables oneto get the best return on inherited cultural capital in the scholastic market or on scholasticcapital in the labour market” (1979). Second and more specifically, parents can providetheir children with science-related cultural capital in how they respond to science and bringit 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 willenhance 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 congruentwith 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 culturalcapital that children acquire over time, through interacting with their parents and throughinformal science education, such as the use of science kits and museum visits. Usingan analysis of a 10-year, longitudinal data set of 1055 respondents, Adamuti-Trache andAndres found that those students whose parents had obtained college degrees were morelikely to enter STEM-related careers. Science classes in secondary school were seen as“reliable strategies” or necessary requirements to enter the postsecondary system and werethus often encouraged by parents as a form of institutionalized cultural capital (Adamuti-Trache & Andres, 2008). This is particularly true of immigrant communities who recognizecertain scientific careers as a means of establishing credibility and status within their newcommunity (Archer et al., 2010).

Figure 1 shows a model proposed by Lyons that shows how the cultural capital that somefamilies hold explicitly supports students in the acquisition of scientific cultural capital andindicates the likelihood of students choosing to persist in physical science subjects.

Although family education undoubtedly is a powerful mode of providing students withthe 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 couldenhance the opportunity to acquire this vital element of cultural capital—an element whichthe cultural habitus of many students’ lives does not provide. On the basis of such anargument, some study and exploration of the range of careers that the study of scienceoffers should be an essential feature of the science curriculum. As the head of careers of



Figure 1. A model proposed by Lyons illustrating how congruence between the cultures of school science andfamily can lead to persistence in the physical sciences (2006).

one of the UK’s foremost science and technology universities has stated, all students needto know at the very minimum that the three high school qualifications that make you mostemployable are math, physics, and chemistry (Simpson, 2004).

Brown, Brown, and Jayakumar (2009) offer a powerful insight into how schools both canprovide 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 cultureserved as a driving force in shaping the culture of the institution” (p. 281). They showedthat 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 forsuch information and the need to be proactive in seeking it out. The researchers concludedthat the school, its teachers, and its counselors served as “gatekeepers for determiningwho ultimately [would] have access to valuable resources” (p. 296). Yet, the study alsoshowed how much students benefited from and appreciated the small amount of informationabout careers that they obtained from teachers, reporting that students learn a lot from whatteachers’ “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 teachersas a significant source of career information. Given that relying on one’s parents to acquiresalient 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 sourceof cultural capital becomes ever more important for underrepresented and underprivilegedstudents.

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 knowledgefor its intrinsic merits—the explanatory value that it has to offer of the material worldand the creative achievement that those explanatory accounts represent. Science, from thisperspective, is perceived as a body of knowledge that has freed society from the shackles ofreceived wisdom, answering questions not only about what we know but also about how we



know, and why scientific knowledge matters (Collins, 2000). In this guise, it is, therefore, acentral component of any liberal education that seeks to develop a knowledge of the “bestthat is worth knowing” (Spencer, 1884). Furthermore, the science classroom is uniquelysituated to teach students an array of skills that constitute cultural capital and that can bedeployed beyond science.

However, that is not the “value” of science education as perceived either by policy makersor its students. For policy makers the value of school science lies in its ability to producethe next generation of scientists, and for its students, value comes in the institutional capitalit offers (Millar, 2007; Millar & Osborne, 1998). The fact that the science curriculum paysscant attention to communicating the role, significance, and value of scientific careers toboth the individual and society is, therefore, deeply ironic. Our point here is not to suggestthat either of these goals is wrong, or that one of them is better than another, but rather thatthe omission of any treatment of the future career potential that the study of science affordsis at best puzzling, and at worst simply confusing to the student. For, if the perceived culturalcapital value of a subject resides in the potential use and application of such knowledge,then the nature of that use—and the potential rewards it might offer—need to be clearlycommunicated. If, on the other hand, the cultural capital acquired by a study of scienceresides solely in its intrinsic merit, why does school science persist in offering a curriculumdominated by the needs of the future scientist? One interpretation might be that within thecultural habitus in which science education exists, it has lost sight of why it matters. Or toput it another way, in the gap that exists between the rhetoric of the policy makers and thereality of the classroom, the value of a science education has been misplaced. Put simply,while science education is valued for its institutionalized cultural capital and its exchangevalue, it is marketed on the basis of its embodied capital and intrinsic interest (and eventhen, this marketing is not well done) suggesting that it does not understand its own valueand is, ultimately, mis-sold.

A more unforgiving explanation for this state of affairs lies in Bourdieu and Passeron’s(1977) argument that the pedagogic work of schools is to socialize their students in thevalues, expectations, and attitudes that enable them to put up with inequality—essentiallyto accept their lot in life rather than providing their students with the skills and knowledgeeither to challenge the dominant cultural arbitrary or to gain entry to privileged elites. Suchactions attempt to impose a body of knowledge on students that is alien to their culturalhabitus. Given that the history of science education has, like many other school subjectsbeen one of incessant attempts at reform (Cuban, 1990; Tyack & Cuban, 1995), most ofwhich have resulted in no substantive changes, the evidence would lend more credenceto this harsher interpretation. In short, that school science education simply sustains andpreserves such inequality, acting solely as a sieve to select those who are prepared to sufferthis confused and confusing experience.

It could be argued that such a state of affairs is functionally ineffective; rather thatsocial differentiation would be sustained more effectively if science education was morecoherent and comprehensible for all students whose cultural habitus had provided themwith the cultural capital to access science. But this would be to fail to understand that suchsymbolic violence is necessary to establish the cultural capital of a form of discourse, which“exalts and reassures all subjects inside, and rejects and offends those outside4” helping toestablish “a vast and monolithic castle of impenetrable speech” (Montgomery, 1996, p. 7).Such discourse establishes a privileged position for the domain it occupies and the lowersocial status of its competitors—and a state of affairs which science education helps tosustain.

4Author’s original emphasis.



What then, can science education reasonably hope to influence? And furthermore, whatcan the science classroom uniquely contribute to ameliorate such effects? Here, we wouldsuggest that Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is both empowering and humbling: It ishumbling 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 culturalcapital of students will only be small; but it is also empowering because Bourdieu’s notionsoffer a means of identifying those elements which are essential if science education is tomake a specific and well-targeted contribution to students’ cultural capital. Our argumenthere has been that three emphases are necessary to breathe life into a subject which iscommonly perceived by students as a “miscellany of facts” (Cohen, 1952) consisting ofunequivocal and uncontested knowledge (Claxton, 1991). First, there needs to be moreemphasis 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 ofthe 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 aretransferable to other domains, school science offers a means for students to see both theintrinsic value of their science classes for their own thinking and the extrinsic value forfuture employment. Third, it needs to sell to its perceived strengths, laying out to its studentsthe value of the institutionalized capital that it has to offer.

Moreover, our contention has been that school science fails to recognize the extrinsicworth of a science education by omitting to tell students of the full panoply of careersthat the study of science offers both within science and external to science. This failurecontributes to perpetuating the extant social order and its attendant economic inequality: ifonly students of a certain background are aware of the forms of institutionalized culturalcapital they can acquire (a degree or a job in a given field), then only those students willembark on those career paths. Surely, one goal of science education, then, should be toensure that all students are enabled to see such possibilities?

Bourdieu thus helps us to reconceive of the worth of a science education and identifyimportant features of a curriculum that contributes to social equality. His concept of culturalcapital has allowed us to determine what a science education is capable of providing to itsstudents that is of intrinsic and extrinsic worth, both today and in their future regardlessof whether such knowledge will be used inside or outside of science. Thus, the theoreticallens offered by Bourdieu and his collaborators helps to establish what the real value of ascience education is for students, teachers, and policy makers. More importantly, it helpsto identify why the failure to ask what is the cultural capital that science education offersits students has led to a set of emphases which have no apparent value for many of today’syoung people. In short, Bourdieu’s ideas explain why formal science education has solditself short, overvaluing what does not count while undervaluing, neglecting, or omittingwhat 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 thearguments in this paper. In addition, work conducted for this paper was partially funded by the UKEconomic and Social Research Council, Grant No. RES-179-25-0008.

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