This study scrutinizes Bourdieu's cultural reproduction theory to have more clear understandings of
the link between cultural domination and educational inequality. For this, this study covers firstly the
concepts of cultural capital, taste, and habitus which are central to understanding Bourdieu's analysis
of how the mechanism of cultural reproduction function concretely within schools. And then the
study makes an attempt at investigating the concept what Bourdieu's call symbolic violence. In
addition, the study debates the advantages and issues of Bourdieu's analysis in the tasks of explaining
class dynamics and reproduction strategies in the contemporary class-divided society.
The major arguments of this study are as follows:
First, class control is not the crude reflect of economic power imposing itself in the form of overt
force and restraint. Instead, it is constituted through the more subtle exercise of symbolic power
waged by a ruling class in order to impose a definition of the social world that is consistent with
its interests. In short, culture becomes the mediating link between ruling class interests and everyday
life.
Second, culture represents the economic and political interests of the dominant class, not as
arbitary and historically contingent, but as necessary and natural elements of the hierarchical social
order.
Third, the dynamics of cultural reproduction function in two ways: firstly the dominant classes
exert their power by defining what counts as meaning, and in doing so they disguise this cultural
arbitariness in the name of neutrality that masks its ideological grounding. Secondly class and power
connect with dominant cultural production not only in the structure and evaluation of the school
curriculum, but also in the dispositions of the oppressed themselves, who actively participate in their
own subjugation.
Fourth, symbolic violence does not mechanically impose itself on the oppressed, it is at least in
part reproduced by them, since the habitus governs practices that assign limits to its operations of
invention.
Fifth, schools reproduce existing power relations subtly via legitimating and reproducing the
dominant culture.
Besides the above arguments, this study points out that what is missing from Bourdieu's political
analysis of culture is the notion that culture is both a structuring and transforming process.