Ethics and competition in Bourdieusian studies of education

ABSTRACT

This conceptual article critiques a popular account of education grounded in Bourdieu’s social theories. Specifically, the article shows how Bourdieu overplays competition and underplays ethics, or people’s diverse ways of imagining, debating, and living out the good. On a Bourdieusian view of education, it is difficult to see how educators and students sometimes seek not just to advance in social fields, but to discern and pursue the good. To address this problem in Bourdieusian theory, the article draws upon ideas developed recently in the anthropology of ethics. The article presents a way of accounting for ethical dynamics in education and illustrates the usefulness of this approach by using it to generate a more comprehensive analysis of the author’s Bourdieusian study of high schools’ career portfolio programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Bourdieu
• competition
• ethics
• morality
• education

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank JCS’s editors and reviewers, as well as Joseph Ferrare, Elizabeth Cherry, Shamus Khan, and VCU’s Critical Reading Group, for their close readings of this article and their invaluable advice.

Disclosure statement

Ross Collin does not have any financial interest or benefit arising from the direct applications of his research.

Notes

1. When Bourdieu (1986) says ‘the principle of competition’ is ‘the principle of all truly social energy’ (p. 2), he says competition is central to human action in all social spaces, not only the spaces of social fields.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ross Collin

Ross Collin is an associate professor of English education in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Virginia Commonwealth University, 3071 Oliver Hall, 1015 W. Main St., Richmond, VA 23284-2020, USA; email: [email protected]; office phone: [phone]. His interests centre on literacy, curriculum theory, and ethics.