The reproduction of educational elites through natural cultivation. A qualitative analysis of educational child-rearing practices as strategies of cultural distinction

Abstract

During the last decades, the socially inclusive educational expansion diluted the previous exclusiveness of upper secondary degrees. Unlike the UK, the USA, or France, no explicit “elite” institutions do exist in the German educational system. Nevertheless, educational inequality is no less pronounced. Hence, what child-rearing practices do educationally privileged families in Germany apply to intergenerationally transfer their social privilege in times of educational expansion? The article focusses on one such practice: the acquisition of humanist knowledge by learning Latin and Ancient Greek as a strategy of cultural distinction. To analyse educational strategies and whether people draw lines of distinction along knowledge in Latin and Ancient Greek, I conducted semi-structured interviews with parents of adolescents who had chosen different foreign language profiles. I show how the acquisition of this specific symbolic capital is embedded in a child-rearing practice aimed at obtaining horizontal educational distinction for a privileged academic class. Additionally, I show that the highly privileged status of particularly established academic families results in a child-rearing practice that I call natural cultivation, a more invisible strategy of distinctive child-rearing that appears almost passive compared to those already discussed more widely (e.g. Lareau 2003).