I fell in love with sociology because of a book. Actually, I read several life-changing books in a life-changing introduction to sociology course taught by a life-changing professor during my second semester of college. You get the picture–I love sociology. But one book stands a head above the rest: Unequal Childhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life by University of Pennsylvania Professor of Sociology Annette Lareau. Over the course of several years, Lareau and her team embedded themselves in 88 middle- and lower-income families to understand how social class influences child-rearing and vertical mobility. Lareau concludes that two distinct parenting styles emerge from socioeconomic status, and that the American education system is designed to favor one over the other. “Concerted cultivation,” found in middle-class families, links activities like reading before bed, conversations at the dinner table, and frequent structured avenues to pursue hobbies to a child’s ability to better advocate for themselves at school. In lower-class families, the “accomplishment of natural growth” characterizes a parenting style where children are simultaneously given fewer opportunities to negotiate with their parents but also more unstructured playtime, causing them to struggle with the rigidity of the school day.
The currency of American education relies on a certain kind of cultural capital, a term coined by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to denote the knowledge and skills that translate to vertical mobility, reinforced in families that employ the “concerted cultivation” parenting approach. Children with a wider vocabulary and more practice bargaining with their parents were able to better communicate with their teachers and follow directions by withstanding the monotony of the school day. Ultimately, Lareau suggests the social class in which a child is raised all but dictates their socioeconomic status as adults, begging the question: is education really the catalyzing force for upward mobility that it purports to be? What struck me most about Unequal Childhoods is how much it resonated with my own life and the educational environments I had spent time in. I carried the privileges of a “concerted cultivation” parenting style from grade school through to a fancy liberal arts college degree, which granted me access to classrooms where my success was measured by my ability to think critically and craft compelling arguments. Even in kindergarten, I distinctly remember a banner hanging above the white board that read “we love mistakes.” Failure, for the sake of learning, was openly encouraged.
10,000 miles away in Bangalore, I find myself in schools affiliated with my HO where the currency of cultural capital is both eerily familiar and decidedly different. India’s reliance on standardized testing as an almost universal measurement of academic success means that students often wade through text books with an emphasis on rote memorization, leaving limited room for critical thinking or imagination at many schools. Mistakes, regardless of their educational value, can prove fatal in this toxic economy of objective academic merit. But even sitting in these classrooms didn’t fully prepare me for the role exams play in dictating future opportunities, in degrees that far outweigh our measly SAT/ACT. My jaw dropped when a friend shared that his exam scores determined not only what college he could attend but what he could study. Wanting to get a degree in computer science, he settled for information technology–considered lesser to computer science by the Indian university system–so he could attend a more highly ranked school. My jaw hit the floor when I learned that a highly coveted position as a civil servant, seen as the golden ticket of lifelong economic stability, required passing an exam administered by the Union Public Services Commission. In 2022, roughly 1.13 million people sat for the exam. Less than 1,000 of them were actually given positions as civil servants (Public Information Bureau, 2022).
You might not be as shocked as I was to learn this, but when you consider the fact that most research agrees that standardized testing is a flawed measure of intelligence, the picture gets a little more depressing. What standardized testing lacks in measuring skills and knowledge it makes up for in predicting social class, because the resources needed to perform well can be purchased by middle and upper-class cultural capital. If education is the key to development, as many seem to think, then we’re certainly going about it all wrong (Borge, 2015). It seems to me that if we put more emphasis on the development of intellectual skills like critical thinking and creative problem-solving and less on the performative learning of rote memorization, we’d actually be creating opportunities for children in poverty to leverage their education in order to climb the social ladder. Any sociologist will tell you that inequality is part and parcel of our social world from the moment we’re born. Education, at its best, should be a remedy.
Sources:
Bourdieu, Pierre. “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction.” 1977.
Brende, Borge. “Why education is the key to development.” World Economic Forum, 2015. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2015/07/why-education-is-the-key-to-development/.
Lareau, Annette. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. University of California Press, 2003.
Public Bureau of Information. “The final result of Civil Services Examination (CSE), 2022 has been declared today, the 23rd May, 2023. Highlights of the result are given below.” Press Release, 2023. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1926637.
