The Family Mechanism Of Cultural Reproduction

Cultural reproduction is an important issue in the study of educational equity.Cultural reproduction refers to the role of cultural capital in class reproduction.There are two mechanisms: school and family.Most of the previous studies explored the school mechanism.However the research on the family mechanism was less and mainly focused on the effect of cultural capital on academic performance without mechanism analysis.Therefore,this study intends to explore the family mechanism of cultural reproduction in order to make up for the lack of previous studies on the family mechanism of cultural reproduction.This study defines the family mechanism of cultural reproduction,and reflects the family mechanism of cultural reproduction through the differences in the stratum of the family mechanism of cultural capital.The main manifestation of the cultural capital family function mechanism is the role of cultural capital in the family,which is specifically reflected in the fact that cultural capital of different strata will have different impacts on children's academics through family factors.These family factors include parents' education expectations,parenting styles,and parental education behaviors.This study adopts a quantitative research approach.Based on the theory of cultural reproduction and the induction of previous studies,this paper proposes a model of the family mechanism of cultural capital and corresponding assumptions,and uses the CEPS database as a sample to convert the original data of the CEPS survey into the variables which are qualified to this study to test models and assumptions.Statistical methods for data analysis and testing include t-test,chi-square test,regression analysis,path analysis,interaction analysis,and chow test.The main conclusions of this study are: 1)In the family mechanism of cultural capital,the stratification of parental education expectation path and parental educational behavior path is the core part of the family mechanism of cultural reproduction;2)for the bottom-class,cultural capital has almost no effect on academic achievement.And this is because the path of the family function of cultural capital is blocked,which is manifested by the insignificant effect of cultural capital on parents' education expectations and the insignificant effect of parental education behavior on academic performance;3)there are two significant paths of cultural capital family effects in the middle-class.Respectively,parents' education expectation and tutoring homework;4)there are significant differences in children's non-academic ability between classes,but there is no significant difference in the effect of cultural capital on non-academic ability between classes.According to the research conclusions,this study puts forward some suggestions for establishing an education compensation mechanism for bottom-class.The establishment of an education compensation mechanism for bottom-class should be based on the school.On the one hand,through the school-home communication systems which lead by schools to improve the understanding of the importance of education to bottom-class parents,provide basic knowledge for bottom-class parents and improve the efficiency of school-home communication.On the other hand,motivation intervention for the bottom-class children to improve their academic motivation should be on going at the same time as well as providing them with adequate education resources.In addition,this study also finds that the unique educational expectations of China's bottom-classes are the hopes of breaking the cage of cultural reproduction.And the China's middle-classes are facing difficulties in the process of maintaining their children's academic advantage.The reasons of this phenomenon are the impact of traditional Chinese culture as well as social and political structures.This study is limited by horizontal data,variable connotations,and statistical methods.The causal inferences between family education models and academic performance are not sufficient,and the analysis is not deep enough.In the future,based on this research,we will use longitudinal data to explore the family mechanism of cultural reproduction more deeply.