Reflection 1              The Impact of Cultural Capital
  

            From personal experience, I can say that class or gender-based cultural capital has impacted my education and also the education of my peers. An idea in the article "Bourdieu on Education and Social Cultural Reproduction" by Roy Nash proposes that working class students would not benefit as much as middle-class students if they were in the same classroom because they would feel alienated (Nash, 1990, p. 435). I do not feel that this is a plausible statement because benefitting from education comes down to the desire the student has to be successful, but it reminds me of an example of what I perceive as class-based cultural capital. At my high school, there were no university prep courses offered, but at the other local high school there was a program called the IB program, which was supposed to prepare students for post-secondary education and even count as possible university credits. I never had the opportunity to take the course because I couldn’t transfer to that school due to transportation reasons. My own school did offer advanced placement courses but they cost money, which my family could not afford. By offering the free IB course, that high school possessed a lot of cultural capital by providing students with higher education which would give those students more educational assets.  I feel as if this impacted me because although I know that I am a smart and hard working student, if my own high school had offered IB courses I, along with many other students, could have benefitted greatly. It seemed as if that school wanted to have class-based cultural capital by boasting that they have students that study at a university level, insinuating higher class. Through my high school not offering the IB program though, I feel as if my education has been impacted.

           
    To offer an example of both class and gender-based cultural capital and how it has impacted my education and also my peers, I think of a class that was offered at my high school: auto body or “shop” class. Only students enrolled in the Occupation Preparation Program (OPP), a program designed to prepare students for the work force after high school instead of post-secondary education, were permitted to take this class and was not available as electives to students enrolled in regular classes. I wish I would have been given the opportunity to take that course because I know nothing about cars and how they operate or even how to fix small jobs. I think having a working knowledge of cars is an important thing to have, but I was never given that chance because I was not in OPP. I view this as class-based cultural capital because the school was only permitting students with low academic levels into the class, perhaps giving the idea that those students are lower class because they don’t make high grades in more academically inclined courses. Or perhaps the school did not want the academically inclined students to be put into the shop class because they felt the students would become less inclined to academia and more inclined towards tradesperson types of jobs, thus ultimately lowering their education capital. In regards to this example being gender-based cultural capital, it was only male students that I ever saw in the shop class, which may be intimidating to any female who wanted to take the course. This leads me to believe that maybe my school was pushing for only men to go into tradesperson jobs as a mechanic.
             I feel my peer’s education has also been impacted through class-based cultural capital in the form of social values. Values that one family holds may differ greatly when compared to another family. These values are then passed onto the children who attend school and it sets the tone for their academic choices, and ultimately their academic career. If a family passes on that knowledge is valuable and leads to having high class-based cultural capital, their child will likely want to achieve that as well. If a family puts value on something other than education, that student is more likely to drop-out or ‘withdraw’ (as Bourdieu puts it) from school. I have seen this happen in my school so many times. My grad class of 2009 went from having about 300 potential graduates to only 247 on graduation day because some of my peers, and even some of my friends, got tired of school and had placed more value on working and having money instead of an education, thus causing their grades to be too low for graduation or just the simple fact that they wanted to drop out. If the parents of these students had placed more value on education, they could have gone on to have more cultural capital and been regarded with a higher class-based cultural capital due to having their education.

               

Images were obtained from:
Pierre Bourdieu

References
 Nash, R. (1990). Bourdieu on Education and Social and Cultural Reproduction. British Journal    of Sociology of Education, Vol. 11, No. 4, 431-446.