Private Schools - are they better or what?

This should put the cat amongst the pigeons - sociologically speaking. This article on the BBC site, reports on research which shows that attending a private school certainly helps. But here’s the really interesting question; is that because private schools are genuinely better, or is it really just one more way in which status and class position reinforce each other - the mechanisms of class advantage in other words?

That’s been one of the questions underlying debate on education over the last decade - or two. Writers like Stephen Pollard and Andrew Adonis argued back in the 1990s that students from comprehensives did less well. That finding has been taken up and parroted out in many sociology textbooks - authors apparently unaware that Pollard and Adonis were in fact arguing that the chief reason why comprehensive students did so badly was because they went to substandard schools.

Yet there is another point of view: its not that state schools are not as good. Schools in general, tend to reproduce the class structure. Status is another great immeasurable, and it should prompt consideration of another concept; Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital. Elites, Bourdieu is saying, to put it crudely, have ways of making their activities and ways of doing things -including school - elite and exclusive. So even if you have an IQ of 200, if you sound like David Beckham, the people who matter will think you are thick anyway.

Um, perhaps not quite how Bourdieu would have put it, but I think it gets the basic idea across.

And yet again - what is it with the news this week - this could be an interesting area to think about for coursework.