Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture

A distinction is made between how the educational system is viewed by the technocrats and the configurationists. Technocrats see in the educational system “only the reflection of a state of the economic system". Technocratic ideology tends to see the educational system in a deterministic way, where a progressive march toward better and better delivery of its economic aims is only a matter of measuring output. Configurationists on the other hand see in the educational system “the direct expression of the value system of ‘society as a whole". They analyze the educational system in terms of the cultural configuration within which it is embedded.

Then the ideological function of the educational system is introduced. The author concludes by saying "Because the traditional system of education manages to present the illusion that its action of inculcation is entirely responsible for producing the cultivated habitus, or, by an apparent contradiction, that it owes its differential efficacy exclusively to the innate abilities of those who undergo it, and that it is therefore independent of class determinations – whereas it tends towards the limit of merely confirming and strengthening a class habitus which, constituted outside the School, is the basis of all scholastic acquirements – it contributes irreplaceably towards perpetuating the structure of class relations and, simultaneously, legitimating it, by concealing the fact that the scholastic hierarchies it produces reproduce social hierarchies."