What makes a good education? Transitional value patterns of educational preferences in Estonian Middle class families

Abstract

The competitiveness of middle-class parents’ educational strategies has been researched extensively across differing institutional contexts, but evidence from Eastern Europe is lacking. This article examines how Estonian middle-class parents with differing amounts of economic and cultural capital harbour contrasting understandings of good education and good parenting, adopting different expectations to the school system characterised by moderate processes of marketization. 36 in-depth interviews with families from varying middle-class backgrounds expose different enclaves of privilege, created by parents’ strong preferences and values. Discourses expressing the importance of a ‘natural childhood’ and supportive schooling are contrasted with elitist approaches to education and a stark separation between the roles of parents and educators. A Bourdieusian framework suggests that these divergent preferences and choices correspond to the predominance of either cultural or economic capitals that different parents have acquired. It is argued that these areas of ‘educational specialisation’ enable middle-class parents to divide and conquer the field of education, ensuring the success of their children no matter what.

Keywords:

• Educational inequality
• Bourdieu
• marketization of education
• family sociology
• educational preferences
• Estonia
• cultural capital
• economic capital
• discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Estonian Research Council under Grant PUT1182.

Notes on contributors

Pille Ubakivi-Hadachi

Pille Ubakivi-Hadachi (MA in Social Sciences) is a junior researcher and a PhD student at the Institute of International Social Studies at Tallinn University. Her main research interests lie in identity studies, family sociology, social inequality, critical theory and gender studies. The topic of her current research project is ‘Belonging as a personal and political construct. Generational identity formation in Estonian, Estonian-Russian and new immigrant families, “Estonian identity” and integration as a political project’.

Gerli Nimmerfeldt

Gerli Nimmerfeldt (PhD in Government and Politics) is a researcher at the Institute of International Social Studies at Tallinn University. Her main research interests cover early childhood inequalities and parental practices, socio-cultural integration of minority youth, identity building processes and reactive identity mechanisms.