Study On Pierre Bourdieu's Educational Sociology Theories

Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most creative and influential contemporary French sociologists. His works has attracted increasing interest in recent years. Since initial publications in the late 1950s and early 1960s he has demonstrated considerable intellectual rigour and insight in engaging with the main social science debates of the day. The list of topics and themes he has covered takes in most of the major fields of study. However, it is education to which his attention has repeatedly turned, and it is probably in education that his ideas have had the greatest impact. Much of his early work dealt with educational issues, topics and themes and appeared in two major books: Les Heritiers ( Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964) and La reproduction ( Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970). The latter was published in English in 1977 and quickly became a classic text in the sociology of education canon. Bourdieu also contributed two chapters to the seminal book, Knowledge and Control (1971), which was edited by Michael Young and represented a new sociological direction in the study of the processes of classroom knowledge construction.The paper is composed of four parts in order to analyze the sociology of education of Pierre Bourdieu:Chapter 1 introduces Bourdieu's life and attempts at a general survey of the source of his philosophical thought. It points out that French epistemological traditions, structuralism and phenomenology play a great role in the formation of Bourdieu's thought.Chapter 2 analyzes the main conceptions of Bourdieu's educational sociology theories, including field, habitus and capital. Here, I discuss them mainly from the basal quality, character and effect of the conceptions. To be more coherent, I analyze it in an respective sequence.Chapter 3 considers the theoretic contribution of Pierre Bourdieu in education, discussing the culture reproduction theory, symbol violence theory and culture capital theory.Chapter 4 focuses on the practical significance of Pierre Bourdieu's educational sociology theories, which is composed of three parts, including analyzing the habitus of the administrators of public middle schools, discussing the influence of culture reproduction theory to the study of culture variance, and dissertating the unjust phenomena in education.