The term - "cultural capital" was developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, who presented "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction" (1977), to conceptually explain the differences of performance and academic achievement of children within the educational system of France in the 1960s; and further developed the concept in the essay "The Forms of Capital" (1985) and in the book The State Nobility: Élite Schools in the Field of Power (1996). Karl Marx had some influence over Bourdieu as the cultural capital theory which can be traced back to the ideas of him.
Here is a brief explanation from a casual style (not a restrict type of academic writing):
Cultural capital, on the other hand, tends to be intangible. They are family assets
In short, cultural capital indicates where one comes from and functions as a member of the different groups to which one belongs. All human groups (tribes, clans, families, associations, subcultures, societies, etc.) have their norms, values, beliefs, and codes of conduct that identify the group and draws its boundaries. One of the important functions of cultural capital is to dichotomize people into insiders and outsiders, or we and them; us and others. Knowing and binding by these cultural codes of conduct is required to maintain one's status as a member, in particular, standing within the group like an invisible caste system. These types of cultural capital can be identified as "refinements, social grace, savoir-faire" and "demeanor, etiquette, and classy vocabulary", as well as the rest of tastes. Individuals from the humble backgrounds intending to mingle into the refine class must acquire the cultural cachet to be accepted into the circle. This is a challenging task. Those born to it, have the advantage of acquiring through inheritance, naturally and economic-culturally, a kind of social osmosis through childhood socialization (Lareau, 2003). Novels, such as The Great Gatsby, The Prince and The Pauper, The Outsiders, The Help, Great Expectation, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, The House of Mirth and so on are saturated with such themes.
Institutionally speaking, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status are reinforced by family, education, politics, and religion to maintain social strata.
Specifically speaking, cultural capital can be differentiated into three major domains:
a. financial capital (can be visible), such as, "If you are admitted to Ivy Leagues, mom and dad will offer you a Porsche, in addition to paying all the academic expenditures"; "if you decide to marry, mom and dad will help you a head-start with a house and car"....etc. Or parents, in order to encourage children to be independent, save their legacy in their wills which in the long run, will be passed on to their offspring to expand children's economic capitals ...etc. On the flip side, the negative financial capitals may hinder the life chances of offspring and increase their life journeys with more obstacles.
(Regarding the negative cultural capital, including the next two types, is beyond enumeration, which will be addressed in another article. Stay tuned.)
b.emotional capital, such as parents' successful marriage nurturing offspring with emotional stability, warmth and security..., and the like. On the contrary, negative emotional capitals may affect children's personality development and emotional disturbances.
c. social capital, such as parents being professionals/contributory residents in the community, throwing wonderful parties to entertain/build better social networking-system which may have impacts on the sociability, confidence, and the future networking of their offspring. Sending children to private schools has the benefits of meeting people of the same kind. Participating in summer/winter science camps, engaging in intellectual activities with the like-minded cohort enhances positive networking opportunities. Joining high-end sports, such as youth golf teams, hockey, figurative skating, gymnasium, also functions the same way. On the other hand, the negative social capitals could impose difficulties on offspring in interacting in groups and communities.
The conventional way is to categorize cultural capital into three types: Institutionalized (e.g., education, knowledge), embodies (e.g., personality, speech skills), and objectified capitals (e.g., material possessions).
Cultural capital is accumulated within the family in many subtle ways, such as the "normalcy" of childhood bedtime stories, playing "Monopoly" in the young age, artistic and taste cultivation (such as early piano, violin, ballet lessons, visiting museums...etc.). Among these daily reinforcers, the most important factor is the linguistic learning opportunities. A strand of research shows that beginning from the infant stage, children acquire both advantages and disadvantages from the early interactions with parents. Hart and Risley (2005) found that middle-class parents communicate with their young children with an average of 487 utterances per hour, while the low-income, with 178. By age 3, middle-class parents offer approximately 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements, whereas, low-income parents, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. At this age group, the average middle-class children know 1,110 words with an IQ of 117, while low-income children know only 525 words with an IQ of 79. Children living in disadvantageous or dysfunctioning families, such as unemployment, drug, alcohol, violence, and the rest of negative situations affect children's proper socialization deeply. Both groups of children carry this early childhood legacy into the subsequent schooling process.
Among visible and invisible capitals, parents' educational and income levels have a strong correlation with offspring's future vertical/horizontal and inter/intra-generational social mobility. Parents of all social class backgrounds want their offspring to be successful, but when asked to pick from a list of personality traits that are desirable of their children, lower-class parents are far more likely than upper-class parents to pick "obedience," "respect authority," as key traits, while well-to-do parents are more likely than low-income parents to point to "be creative," ""thing for themselves." (NORC, 2013). In short, well-off, highly educated parents nurture their offspring far beyond money can give. Since most of the cultural capital is not directly related to income or wealth, thus, it tends not to be quantifiable or visible to the common people's perception or understanding.
Most people believe in individualistic "meritocracy" imprinted in Horatio Alger's stories: working hard, and the American dreams will come true. One earns his/her success or owns his/her failure based on his/her personal merits or faults, nothing else. Indeed, there is no such thing as standing on the giants or dwarfs' shoulders, other than on individual exceptionalism.
Since the concept of Cultural Capital was originated in France in the late 70s to mid-80s, and transmitted to the US. The subtle difference of cultural ambient in Europe and the US might entice different sensitivity of its impact on life chances, meritocracy, and social mobility.
Cultural capital is one of the most important determinants to shape class contents. Parenti (1994) employs the term of "class supremacy" that begets "class bigotry". For example, from the seventeenth century to the present time, laissez-faire/free-market economists insisted to treat people in different social class dissimilar incentives. A common stereotype on the poor is that they must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious. Harvard University political scientist E. Banfield claims that the poor are the source of much of their own troubles because they suffer from a "low-class" mentality. The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment... Impulse governs their behavior, either because they cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for future satisfaction, or he has no sense of the future....." (The Unhealthy City, 1970). O. Lewis' " Culture of Poverty" provided similar factors of learned helplessness and self-resignation of the poor that perpetuates poverty (1966). Following in a similar vein, economist F. Rohatyn (1981) explained that the economic gap between class grew in the late 1970s to early 1980s partly because most of the children who went to public schools came from families that "fail to provide them with serious ethical principles". Earlier in 1981, G. Gilder's Wealth and Poverty, profusely praised by conservatives and mainstream publicans, argued that capitalism begins with giving, not from greed...but from spirit closely akin to altruism. According to him, the poor are undermined by public-support programs and by their refusal to work hard. On the contrary, J. Kozol taught in the inner-city schools, visiting and collecting first-hand data presented in his well-researched and documented book -Savage Inequalities (1991).
One more issue is that some other fields and individuals tend to see sociology overemphasizing the power of social forces imposed on individuals, and less exploring individual's will, uniqueness, talents and endeavors in shaping their social life. Undeniably, there is always a tugging war between individuals and societies: individual forms society, society forms individual, and how they mutually shape each other: which side tells more stories? Like the decades' debates of genetics-and-environment's impacts on individuals, both provide intersectional quantity and quality to a person's life. For example, people admire, worship, or condemn individuals like Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Neapolitan, Gandhi, Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer or an observable successful/notorious man or woman in daily life, deeming them as supermen with tremendous power to accomplish/destroy missions-impossible. So, an individual's bio-personality traits versus social forces, which ones take on more influence on his/her accomplishment/destruction? For a cross-disciplinary exercise of sociology and psychology, I would like to borrow a psychotherapy model to add more information to answer the above question - Ellis' ABC theory (Cognitive-behavioral Therapy- Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)):
The rationale behind the ABC model is that “external events (A) do not cause emotions (C), but beliefs (B) and, in particular, irrational beliefs (IB) do” (Sarracino et al., 2017). That means emotions and behaviors (C: Consequences) which are not directly determined by life events (A: Activating Events), but rather by the way these events are cognitively processed and evaluated (B: Beliefs)” (Oltean et al., 2017). Furthermore, REBT divides beliefs into “rational” and “irrational” beliefs. Here, a good point is that beliefs are not generated from the individual-cognitive domain. They are products of society (social forces)!
In my Psychology of Human Relations class, this model is a must for students to understand and practice in daily life as a way to help reduce stress and frustration. A typical example used in the class goes this way: Jenny and John will meet each other at 5 pm. in a local restaurant as their first date (during the BCE era - before the cellphone era). John arrived around 5 pm. but he did not see Jenny. He kept on waiting for another 10, then 20 minutes, still not seeing Jenny. He tried to call her, but no answers. So, what would be the typical reaction of John?
The first type of reaction is toward the individual: "She is not really interested in me?" "She stood me up..." "She thinks who she is?" "Doesn't she know she isn't the only one I am dating?" Even worse, "WTF?" or " I am ashamed of myself..." "Maybe I should not have asked her out..." John left with frustration and/or anger.
The second type of reactions related to situational/environmental conditions are: "Could be traffic jam?" "Something beyond her control happened at this moment?" The B, Belief System interprets the situation (social force) which goes beyond the individual's conditions.
So, how often do people take on step B to interpret an activated adverse event like John's without jumping into Step C, the consequence?
It may sound irrelevant to the tugging war between individuals and society by referring to a therapeutic model functioning at the individual level. In a deductive explanation, a "MadMan" Hitler disliked Jews (A, activated event) and then caused the Holocaust (C, consequences). In this case, the general population might focus on the Draconian Capacity of this destructive Individual to create human catastrophe, which may dismiss the historical and politico-economic conditions in Germany after War World I, which shaped most part of Hitler's B, Belief System. According to Georg Lukács, in his Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (1954, p.565), points out the following key formations of his views on Germany at that time: (1) his years as a poverty-stricken young man in Vienna and Munich prior to World War I, during which he turned to nationalist-oriented political pamphlets and antisemitic newspapers out of distrust for mainstream newspapers and political parties; (2) the closing months of World War I when Germany lost the war as Hitler is said to have developed his extreme nationalism during this time, desiring to "save" Germany from both external and internal "enemies" who in his view betrayed it; (3) and the 1920s, during which his early political career began and he wrote Mein Kampf. Hitler formally renounced his Austrian citizenship on 7 April 1925 but did not acquire German citizenship until almost seven years later; thereby allowing him to run for public office.
It can be seen how the multiple social forces converged in an intensified point that ignites the dry woods into an inferno.
Both individual and social forces carry multiple weighted variables to tug the war, yet, individual agency, no matter how powerful it is, does not occur in the vacuum, including "born genii". Such as the following poster shows the personal will and disciplines to pursue life goals when the majority of the individual endeavors are invisible to the observers. It is an encouraging message to any individual. Nevertheless, like Horatio Alger's meritocracy dismisses the success, fame, status, power, and wealth that are products of society.
The individual success:
In reality, success is the product of individual efforts interplayed by social forces:
With the understanding of individuals and scholars in different time-frames and academic disciplines on poverty and class, now we can come back to see what happens to the microcosm of cultural capital in my sociology and diversity studies classrooms.
When covering social stratification and social class, my major concern is how to help students visualize to connect their cognition to the bigger social structures. For this task, I tend to use the following classic video to illustrate how cultural capital strongly correlates to life chances, social mobility, and fundamentally, the "abstract" notion of "social class." Though it was filmed in 1957, the sturdy class structure is more salient and prevalent today than ever.
Can you identify Cultural Capital in this short film?
But you might also notice that the protagonists, the storyline, even the narrator, all were "Caucasians". Obviously, the concept of social class was circumscribed within a "typical white" frame, in a specific locale. Fortunately, the narrator did remind viewers that the scenario would be quite different if located in different cities, different world. Since the film was created in late the 50s, the notion of multiculturalism and today's "diversity" issues might not be salient enough to appear on the Class radar.
I designed a slide to add more info related to current situations. It is used to discuss theories of the role, status, cultural capital, meritocracy, quality vs. equity (life chances), and class, based this strand of research regarding how the class-divide is getting wider and faster.
See below.
The original longitudinal research focused on two "white" male 3rd graders who had similar personalities, ambition, academic aspiration and leadership identified by their teachers. The research team followed these two students over two decades and found out one of them was successful according to the teachers' prediction in fulfilling the "American Dream", while the other was drifting on paycheck by paycheck. What were the possible reasons for explaining such a big difference between these two students? Among many variables, the research team identified that social class was the main factor in widening such a gap.
Again, like the above video, the subjects were white male students. I added other dimensions into the case: race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability.
The white line is the visible starting point for these children to run the life race. I ask students questions about what can happen to these students to reach the "goal" line (can be real, imaginary, or hypothetical). After discussion, I show the yellow line to help visualize a major condition in facilitating the race:
I just converted my teaching materials (PowerPoint) on Social Stratification, Social Class, and Global Stratification into video, attached below:
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The following one is a frequently used video regarding social class and privileges:
Privileges and its flip side of stigmas have another long pedagogical story. First of all, let us clarify a couple of muddy concepts. Privilege is quite similar yet with a certain amount of subtle differences from entitlement. In my Diversity Studies class, we use a general definition: the advantages, provided by social statuses (both positive and negative). Here, status is a social position that people occupy in a specific society. It mainly can be differentiated into three types: ascribed, achieved, and master status. I need to admit that how obsessed I am in emphasizing these root-concepts in both of my sociology and diversity studies classes to understand social stratification and human diversity.
Ascribed statuses are social positions which are born with (both positively or negatively given), such as born to be white, black, male, female, with health/congenital disease, born into well-off, struggling families and so on Not-by-Choice conditions, or involuntarily assumed later in life, such as a disabled veteran. Achieved statuses are earned based on the ascribed, or voluntarily obtained, reflecting one's efforts and ability, both in the positive and negative way, such as an honor student, or a felon. Master status in sociology is a social position that has the greatest importance in a particular person's life. It can be based on any status, such as social class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physicality (ability and disability), religion, occupation and the rest of relevance to the socio-economic statuses.
Entitlement, on the other hand, in general, is a belief that one has the right to respect, protection, reward, and other privileges. Some studies differentiated it into three categories: normal, inflated, and compromised. A normal sense of entitlement includes an expectation of responsiveness from significant others, a sense of agency, and a grasp of one's right to one's own feelings - all forming positive elements in self-esteem. The inflated sense of entitlement, or self-entitlement, seek special privileges for the individual (can be extended to a corporate company), perceived as deserving of unearned privileges. These people, including corporate companies, believe life/economy owes them something: a reward, a measure of success, a compensation (perhaps to compensate for a certain type of suffering or "narcissistic injury"). The compromised, involve an inability to expect the basic rights enjoyed by those around one. Particularly, entitlement has been extended to informal expectations of social relationships, social conventions and social norms which are considered unreasonable or unduly prescriptive upon others. People in an affluent society enjoy or possess various types of entitlements related to race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion and the rest of diverse human conditions than those in a low-income country. For examples, from the basic human rights of K-12 education, universal health care, safe food and living conditions, clean air and water, to the right of reaching the year of 16 to pass tests and own a car, which are out of the question in most of the less fortunate societies.
This major challenge happens in my classroom regarding pedagogy is that privileges (in particular, class privileges which are much more abstract than those of the racial privileges) tend to be invisible (entitlement, too) - especially when in recognizing one's own. It is a common phenomenon in the general population, but so in the "bright ones". Here are some episodes from the recognized "enlightened" or nice individuals.
The first episode is gender intersected with class: in the mid-twentieth century, North Carolina communist Junius Scales who came from a prosperous family was astonished to find out the poverty existing among many people in his home town after he joined the Party (Scales et al, 1987).
The second one is also an intersection between class and gender. French novelist George Sand renowned for her cross-dressing in male attires, fighting for women's rights, denounced the revolutionary women and men of Paris. She proclaimed, "The mob... is composed in part of dupes and fools, in part of the most degraded and criminal element of the population...nothing but a lot of coarse clowns" (Maurois,1953). The class privileges were so invisibly taken-for-granted, whether one would deem it as blind or innocently hypocritical when self-serving interests are threatened. Recalling a recent event a female Presidential candidate, slipped her tongue by using the word "deplorable" referring the mass not favoring her political platforms, which was spun into a sensational political event by her opponents.
Following the same vein, the third case was related to the wise wife of President John Adams. This again shows that not just men who tend to be oppressors of women, "The mode of gender oppression often varies according to class and race". (Parenti, 1994). Abigail Adams, in the famous letters to her husband, forthrightly argued woman's cause, yet she wrote to Thomas Jefferson denouncing Shay's Rebellion when farmers of western Massachusetts facing ruinous taxes, foreclosure, and the prospect of prison for debts, took up arms in 1787. She expressed her hostility in the letter, " ...ignorant, restless desperado, without conscience or principles, has led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under the pretense of grievances which have no existence but in their imagination..."(The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1955).
The last episode is a short story that I use quite often in my classes related to invisible privileges. It is about the 3rd grader's in-class writing assignment. The topic is "Who are poor people?" One of the writings caught the teacher's attention. It said, " I think I am a poor person because my mother is poor to hire a housemaid even poorer. She seems never eat fruits and vegetables during her breaks. My father is poor too, for he can only afford a poor chauffeur. His clothing has wrinkles, and he always wears the same old shoes to drive my father to his office. I live with many poor people. So, I think I am poor too".
Judging past by the contemporary morality is futile, but elucidating the well-rooted blindness, or denial of one's own privileges of class, race, gender, sexuality, and the rest of man-made entitlements and inequality is the point.
Indeed, in the contemporary society, privileges make life easier and safer, yet unrecognized by people possessing them, more examples, such as certain skin tone being less likely to endure racial profiling; certain religious groups, safer for worship; right-handy people not to be worrying about the utility design that concerns the left-handed individuals; middle and upper class people not to worry about the life chances as much as other classes do; the Legacy Admission to elite colleges, less likely under "affirmative action" scrutiny... and the rest of enormous hidden privileges (and the opposite, stigmas) permeating in daily life. Since the late 80s, scholar Peggy McIntosh developed the concept of Privilege, focusing on gender aspects, the term has expanded to class, race/ethnicity, sexuality, disability, religion, marriage, and the rest of human diversity conditions related to privileges.
Thus, an anatomy of social status (ascribed, achieved, and master) comes handy to help in explaining both the visible and invisible privileges.
Other handy tools developed by Canadian-American sociologists (social psychology) Erving Goffman (1962) help to distinguish between the discredited and discreditable statuses in stigmatized conditions. A discredited master status is a social position immediately apparent to an observer, such as race, gender, the visible disability, while a discreditable status is a person's stigma can be hidden, such as social class, sexuality, some race and ethnicity, and cognitive disability. Thus, passing a specific stigmatized status becomes possible.
In the ranking activity, Caucasian (in general term) students reflected quite differently from a tiny group of minority students (based on the visible attributes, such as gender and race). For the hierarchy of privilege, Caucasian students less ranked race and class that offer more privileges than those of other attributes, while the racial minority students, none of them ranked race as a privilege. For the hierarchy of stigma exercise, Caucasian students tend to rank disability as the top one disadvantage, while minority students are likely to be consistent in the ranking race as the highest hurdle in life.
I selected some images used in part of my Unit 2 learning materials (PowerPoint, videos, and other ancillaries. This course of Diversity Studies was designed into 4 learning units.)
Another frequently used video related to this unit of learning is: The structured discrimination - the unequal opportunity in RACE (including a subtle tone of gender too.)
The video of my PowerPoint was attached below (this is the second unit learning materials of the four).
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Extra thoughts:
Some friends are curious about the effects of showing this type of supplementary learning videos. Questions were raised, such as: "Do students understand the concepts of social class, privileges, and cultural capitals better after having watched these videos?" "Do students change their perceptions toward these abstract ideas if they see them differently or disagree with them?" "Do students question why the instructor shows this type of video?"
Before sharing part of my observations and thoughts at this point, I would like to mention that the 2-year college system is quite a unique and important "secret weapon" of the US. Its open admission policy makes a significant step toward the "democratization of education." Education shall not be the privilege of the few, though this system is not without many obstacles to be overcome.
I have taught Sociology for 20 years both at a 4-year and 2-year college. But I did not conduct formal research regarding these interesting questions. I do have an impressionistic understanding based on my observations (could be over-generalized) :
Sociologist Peter Berger once said (1992), "One can be an excellent physicist without ever stepping outside of one's society. I know this not so for a sociologist." C. Wright Mills' sociological imagination intended to help people go beyond the one dimensional perception and understanding (flat, individuals, primary groups) into the 2nd (immediate, impersonal secondary groups, such as organization, bureaucracy, and various types of social institutions) and the 3rd dimensional domains of society (from state to the global community and the relevant time and space of concerns). I made a poster to illustrate such a condition:
Individualism facilitates meritocracy. People perceive social mobility based on personal merits or inadequacy. Horatio Alger's flaring optimism is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can inspire students to continue fighting for what they want to achieve. As this national motto goes, "Work hard, and your dream will come true." One the other hand, it may reinforce the mass to be blind to the bigger social forces that are constructed to hinder one's life chances. In some cases, ignorance can be bliss.
Sociologists Davis-Moore (1945) and Tumin (1953) propound different theses in this regard. The Davis-Moore thesis argues that the unequal rewards for different talents and efforts are a major manifest function of society. Thus social stratification is necessary to provide incentives for high job performance and productivity. Nevertheless, Marvin Tumin holds a conflict perspective. He points out that the castelike inheritance and privileges enhancing some individuals to reach their potentials while making sure others won't get ahead. The premise of a leveled playing field facilitating the idea of Meritocracy is interpreted with different foci.
I have been at a 2-year college for 16 years. So, I will share more of my observations regarding this type of unique post-secondary educational institution. Most of the 2-year tech college students come from the working-class or working-poor background. 75-85 % of students rely on Federal Government Financial aid, such as Perkins or Pell grants, as well as the revenue from the local home-owner's taxes. About 5 to 10% of students are interested in pursuing a 4-year college education (a very small group of students, registered in a special "liberal Art" program for transferring.) The rest are occupation-oriented learners. Overall, a typical classroom of mine may look like this: About 30 to 40% are non-traditional students, due to job market vicissitude, returning school for new information, pursuing extra degrees, job-related training requirements, and the rest with the adult world issues. Among traditional students, 10% to 20% are high school drop-out, with GED, or with personal/family issues; 5% to 10% are with various kinds of disability or learning conditions; approximate 10 to 15% register courses to gain financial aid or keep a student status without specific intention to attend or complete courses; around 5% to 10% plan for transferring to a 4-year college with high academic aspiration and preparation; the rest are moratorium in the post-secondary education system. Social stratification research shows a high correlation between values/attitudes/ political ideology and class background, as well as between parents' education-income level and children's socialization prepossess. Lower-income individuals show a stronger authoritarian personality than that of the higher class background. For example, from students' writing, students of the lower- class background tend to believe in themselves being middle class or see class which does not exist in the US. The majority don't see class having any impact on their daily life. I have a question for both students of my Sociology and Diversity Studies regarding what the differences are among Race, Gender, and class. Most students are able to identify race and gender (physically visible part or what you see is what you get) related to minority groups. Regarding class, 80 to 90% of them, either skipped it or did not see social class matter.
I randomly recalled one of my sociology classes during last semester, after having watched the 1957 video, I got some verbal responses:
1. Why does sociology want to divide us?
2. I am not aware that I belong to the working poor,
according to the categorization in the video. It makes me feel bad.
3. What is wrong when one was born into a lower social class?
4. I prefer not to know about the idea of social class.
5. I am happy about my current situation - or, my class.
Not everyone wants to join the horse race.
6. Is the higher social class happier than the lower ones?
Approximate 80 to 90% of the expressions are based on personal experiences, seldom expanding to the 2nd or the 3rd-dimensional settings of social forces circumscribed by class. These recurrent conditions sometimes make me skeptical about how effective it is in facilitating stratification at the 2-year tech college setting. Social stratification and its key themes of cultural capital, life chances, meritocracy, various types of social mobility related to role/status (ascribed vs. achieved) carry such a heavyweight in sociology!
Then, once in a while, a very small group of students who can grasp the impact of cultural capital related to life chances and social mobility, but expressing: " You know - life is not fair. Suck it up! What else can I do? I am a small potato..." These students tend to be nursing students (or from other competitive degree programs), or professionals returning to school for extra-occupational degree pursuits. Some come from a more liberal family background or middle class, not many, though. That sometimes, triggers me wanting to cover the dynamic, the last unit of sociology: Collective Actions and Social Movements ahead of the regular teaching sequence and schedule. Ultimately, one of the important goals of sociology is to empower individuals to be active participants in society.
But without building a solid foundation in understanding culture/society, socialization, (role, status, social interaction), groups/organizations, the incomplete socialization outcome of deviance, and institutions that are embedded with various forms of social forces and inequality, it is hard to help students see the sources, origins and the necessity of social movements which are vital to any society to thrive.
While I was writing the conclusion of this article, the song "Everybody wants to rule the world" was on the air:
Lyrics
Welcome to your life
There's no turning back
Even while we sleep
We will find You acting on your best behavior
Turn your back on mother nature
Everybody wants to rule the world
It's my own desire
It's my own remorse
Help me to decide
Help me make the most Of freedom and of pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world
There's a room where the light won't find you
Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down
When they do, I'll be right behind you
So glad we've almost made it
So sad they had to fade it
Everybody wants to rule the world
I can't stand this indecision
Married with a lack of vision
Everybody wants to rule the world
Say that you'll never, never, never, need it
One headline, why believe it?
Everybody wants to rule the world
All for freedom and for pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world
Songwriters: Chris Hughes / Ian Stanley / Roland Orzabal
Suddenly, a relevant song popped into my mind:
Lyrics
Out of the ruins, out from the wreckage
Can't make the same mistakes this time
We are the children, the last generation
We are the ones they left behind
And I wonder when we are ever gonna change?
Living under the fear, till nothing else remains
We don't need another hero,
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond the Thunderdome
Looking for something we can rely on
There's got to be something better out there.
Mmmm, love and compassion, their day is coming
All else are castles built in the air
And I wonder when we are ever gonna change?
Living under the fear, till nothing else remains.
All the children say,
We don't need another hero,
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond the Thunderdome
So what do we do with our lives?
We leave only a mark.
Will our story shine like a light,
Or end in the dark?
Give it all or nothing!
We don't need another hero,
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond the Thunderdome
All the children say,
We don't need another hero,
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond the Thunderdome
Songwriters: Graham Hamilton Lyle / Terry Britten
Cultural capital is a part of multiple factors correlated to the life chances, social mobility of offspring, and class structures. Surely, other individual variables are important too, including a personal will, ingenuity, resilience, and endeavors.
Doesn't life look like the relay game, connecting generations to generations, family to family, and society to society? Where is cultural capital to be seen in these competitive human races? How do we define heroes/heroines/success, and over-glorified as such?
Indeed, "life is not fair." But does it have to be in such a fashion that 1 to 5% of families own most of the general capitals and cultural capital of a nation (such as 84%, the US.) in order to sustain an elite/aristocratic social stratum? Why and how is the wider and faster in class-divide like elephant in the room?
Again, sociology intends to understand the tugging war between the individual and society.
