The complexity of educational elitism: moving beyond misrecognition

Abstract

Critical, and in particular Bourdieusian, sociology of education is often suspicious about educators when they describe their ideal students. It tends to see these descriptions as euphemisations, so that apparently intellectual assessments are really elitist evaluations about students’ class positions. However, this way of thinking about educators can lead to reductive accounts in which actors are completely blind to the real meaning of their beliefs, which must be unveiled by sociologists. In this article I utilise Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology to offer an alternative model of educators’ accounts, in which there is no real meaning to be unveiled, but rather a complex mix of meanings held in educators’ minds at once. Analysing interview data with those teaching on new liberal arts degrees in English universities, I demonstrate what can be gained by staying with the complexity of participants’ own accounts, rather than mining them for one fundamental truth.

Keywords:

• elitism
• Luc Boltanski
• pragmatic sociology
• Pierre Bourdieu
• misrecognition
• liberal arts

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants for their involvement in the study, and Lizzie Seal and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The complexity of students’ actual motivations is often missed when we focus solely on how academics conceive of students (Hurst 2013). While I focus on lecturers’ ideas about their students in this article, I have interviewed students as well as part of the same project, and will discuss that data in future publications.

2 Pre-92 is a term designating those institutions that were already universities before the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 relaxed restrictions on that title. Post-92 refers to those institutions that have become universities since then. The pre-92/post-92 distinction is often used as shorthand for more or less elite status.

3 For a more thoroughgoing criticism of the role of homology in Bourdieu, see Lane (2006), and for further critique of the abstractions of field, see Watkins (2018).