THE SCHOOL AS A CONSERVATIVE FORCE Scholastic and Cultural Inequalities

I is probably cultural inertia which still makes us see education in terms of the ideology of the school as a liberating force (‘l’école libératrice’) and as a means of increasing social mobility, even when the indications tend to be that it is in fact one of the most effective means of perpetuating the existing social pattern, as it both provides an apparent justification for social inequalities and gives recognition to the cultural heritage, that is, to a social gift treated as a natural one. As processes of elimination occur throughout the whole of the period spent in education, we can quite justifiably note the effects they have at the highest levels of the system. The changes of entering higher education are dependent on direct or indirect selection varying in severity with subjects of different social classes throughout their school lives. The son of a manager is eighty times as likely to get to university as the son of an agricultural worker, forty times as likely as the son of a factory worker and twice as likely as even the son of a man employed in a lower-salaried staff grade.1 It is striking that the higher the level of the institution of learning, the more aristocratic its intake. The sons of members of managerial grades and of the liberal professions account for 57 per cent of students at the École Polytechnique, 54 per cent of those at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (noted for its ‘democratic’ intake), 47 per cent of those at the Ecole Normale and 44 per cent of those at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques. However, simply stating the fact of educational inequality is not enough. We need a description of the objective processes which continually exclude children from the least privileged social classes. Indeed, it seems that a sociological explanation