3 

EXCLUSION AND SELECTION
The examination is nothing but the bureaucratic baptism of knowledge,
the official reC"ognition of the transubstantiation of profane
knowledge into sacred knowledge.
Marx
Critique ofHegel's Doctrine ofthe State
To explain the importance of the role the French educational system
assigns to the examination, it is first necessary to break with the
explanations offered by spontaneous sociology, which imputes the
most salient features of the system to the unexplained legacy of a
national tradition or the inexplicable action of the congenital conservatism
of academics. But the question is not at an end when, by
recourse to the comparative method and to history, one has accounted
for the characteristics and internal functions of the examination within
a particular system of education: it is only by making a second break,
this time with the illusion of the neutrality and independence of the
school system with respect to the structure of class relations, that it
becomes possible to question research into examinations so as to
discover what examinations hide and what research into examinations
only helps to hide by distracting inquiry from the elimination which
takes place without examination.
;-,
141
142 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
THE EXAMINAnON WITHIN
THE STRUcruRE AND HISTORY
OF THE EDUCAnONAL SYSTEM
It is all too obvious that, at least in present-day France, examinations
dominate university life, that is to say, not only the representations and
practices of the agents but also the organization and functioning of the
institution. Commentators have often enough described the anxiety
engendered by the total, harsh and partly unpredictable verdicts of the
traditional tests, or the dislocated rhythm inherent in a system of
organizing school work which, in its most anomic forms, tends to
acknowledge no other incentive than the imminence of an absolute
deadline. In fact the examination is not only the clearest expression of
academic values and of the educational system's implicit choices: in
imposing as worthy of university sanction a social definition of knowledge
and the way to show it, it provides one of the most efficacious
tools for the enterprise of inculcating the dominant culture and the
value of that culture. As much as or more than through the constraints
of curriculum and syllabus, the acquisition of legitimate culture and the
legitimate relation to culture is regulated by the customary law which is
constituted in the jurisprudence of examinations and which owes its
main characteristics to the situation in which it is formulated.!
Thus, for example, the French-style dissertation defines and diffuses
rules of writing and composition whose authority xtends into the most
diverse areas, since one can find the stamp of these school manufacturing
devices in products as different as an administrative report, a
doctoral thesis or a literary essay. To get a complete idea of the
characteristics of this mode of written communication, which presupposes
the examiner as the sole reader, one would only have to
compare it with the disputatio, a debate between peers, conducted in
the presence of. the masters and a whole audience, through which the
medieval university inculcated a method of thought applicable to any
form of intellectual and even artistic production; or the pa-ku-wen, the
'eight legged-essay' which constituted the decisive test in the com-
143Exclusion and Selection
petitions of the Ming and early Ch'ing periods and was the school of
formal refinement for poet and learned painter, or with the British
university essay, whose rules are not so different from those of the
literary genre of the same name and in which the subject must be
approached with wit and a light touch, unlike the French-style dissertation
which must start with an introduction setting out the problem
'with brio and brilliance', but in a style free from all familiarity or
personal comment. It would be seen that the different types of
academic test, which are always, at the same time, institutionalized
models of communication, provide the prototype for the pedagogic
message and, more generally, for a,ny message of a certain intellectual
ambition (lectures, reports, political speeches, press conferences, etc.).2
Thus, the schemes of expression and thought which are too hastily put
down to national character' or 'schools of thought' may well derive
from the models organized by a training directed towards a particular
type of academic test:3 for example the forms of mind associated with
the French grandes ecoles can be related to the forms of the entrance
competitions and, more precisely, to the models of composition, style
and even articulation, delivery or diction, which define in each case the
accomplished form of presentation or elocution. More generally, it is
clear that, as Renan showed, a selection procedure such as the concours
reinforces the primacy which the whole tradition of the French University
gives to qualities of form:
It is most regrettable that the concours should be the only means of entering
the teaching profession and that practical skill, combined with adequate
knowledge, cannot give access to it. Those men most experienced in educating,
who bring to their difficult task not brilliant faculties but a solid mind with a
little slowness and timidity, will in public examinations always be placed after
young men who know how to amuse their audience and their judges and who,
though their glib tongues will get them out of trouble, have neither patience
nor firmness enough to teach well.'
r,
If it is true that examinations always express, inculcate and consecrate
the values linked to a certain organization of the educational
system, a certain structure of the intellectual field and, through these
144 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
mediations, the dominant culture, it is clear why questions as insignificant
at first sight as the number of baccalaureat sessions per year,
the breadth of the syllabuses or the marking procedures should give rise
to passionate polemics, not to mention the indignant resistance encountered
by any challenging of institutions which crystallize as many
values as the agnSgation, the dissertation, the teaching of Latin, or the
grandes ecoles.
When one sets out to describe the most marked effects of the
preponderance of examinations in intellectual practices and institutional
organization, the French system offers the most perfect examples
and, because it constitutes a limiting case, raises with particular force
the question of the (internal and external) factors that can explain the
historical or national variations in the functional weight of the examination
within the educational system. Consequently, there is no alternative
to using the comparative method when one wants to separate out
what derives from external demands and what derives from the way
they are responded to, or what, in the case of a given system, derives
from the generic tendencies every educational system owes to. its
essential function of inculcation, to the particular traditions of a
university history, and to its social functions, which are never completely
reducible to the technical function of communication and
producing skills.
If it is true that, as Durkheim observed, the asJvent of the examination
- unknown to Antiquity, which saw only independent or even
competing schools and teachers -- presupposes the existence of a
university institution, i.e. an organized corps of professional teachers
providing for its own perpetuation;5 and if it is also true, as Weber
argued, that a system of hierarchized examinations consecrating a
specific skill and giving access to specialized careers appeared, in
modern Europe, only in conjunction with the growing demand from
bureailcraLic organizations for hierarchized, interchangeable individuals
to correspond to the hierarchy of posts offered;6 and if it is true that a
system of examinations ensuring formal equality for all before identical
tests (the pure form of which is the national concours) and guarantee-
145Exclusion and Selection
ing identically qualified individuals equal chances of entering the profession
satisfies the petty-bourgeois ideal of formal equity - then there
seem to be grounds for seeing no more than a particular manifestation
of a general tendency of modern societies in the proliferation of
examinations, the broadening of their social range and the growth of
their functional weight within the educational system. But this analysis
accounts only for the most general aspects of educational history
(explaining for example, why social upgrading independent of educational
level tends to decline as a society becomes more industrialized
and bureaucratized7) and fails to grasp that which the functioning and
function of examinations owe, in their specific form, to the inherent
logic of the educational system. By virtue of the particular inertia
which characterizes it, especially when invested with the traditional
function of conserving and transmitting a culture inherited from the
past and when provided with specific means of self-reproduction, the
school system is able to subject external demands to a systematic
retranslation (systematic because effected in accordance with the
principles which define it as a system). This is where the prerequisite
stated by Durkheim takes on its full Significance. Weber, who, in his
sociology of religion, makes allowance for the tendencies proper to the
sacerdotal corps, fails to take account (probably because he considers
the educational system from an external point of view, i.e. from the
point of view of the requirements of a bureaucratic organization) of
what an educational system owes to the transhistorical and historical
characteristics of a body of professional educators. Everything in fact
suggests that the force of tradition weighs particularly heavily in an
institution which, as Durkheim remarked, is more directly dependent
on its own past because of the particular form of its relative autonomy.
To be convinced that the French system which, of all the educational
systems of Europe, gives the greatest weight to examinations,
defines itself less than it appears to in relation to the demands of
economy, it is sufficient to observe that, in a systetn like that of
classical China, which aimed primarily to train the functionaries of a
prebendal bureaucracy, most of the features of the French system of
146 Reproduction: In Education. Society and Culture
selection could be paralleled.s If the Confucian tradition managed to
impose its literary ideal so completely, it did so because no educational
system has ever been more totally identified with its function of
selection than the mandarin system, which was more concerned with
organizing and codifying its competitions than with setting up schools
and training teachers. And perhaps also because the hierarchy of academic
achievement has never more rigorously determined the other
social hierarchies than in a society where the official 'remained throughout
his life under the control of the school':9 the three major degrees
(in which, as Weber points out, French translators immediately saw the
equivalent of the baccalaureat, licence and doctorat)
were considerably augmented by intermediary, repetitive and preliminary
examinations (. ..) For the first degree alone there were ten types of examinations.
The question usually put to a stranger of unknown rank was how many
examinations he had passed. Thus, in spite of the ancestor cult, how many
ancestors one had was not decisive for social rank. The very reverse held: it
depended upon one's official rank whether one was allowed to have an
ancestral temple (or a mere table of ancestors, which was the case with
illiterates). How many ancestors one was permitted to mention was determined
by official rank. Even the rank of a city god in the Pantheon depended
upon the rank of the city's mandarin.' 0
Thus systems as different as those of modern France and classical China
owe their common orientations to the fact that both treat a demand for
social selection (in one case the demand of a traditional bureaucracy, in
the other that of a capitalist economy) as an opportunity for fully
expressing the peculiarly professorial tendency to maximize the social
value of the human qualities and vocational qualifications which those
systems produce, assess and consecrate.!!
But for a full explanation of how the French system has been able to
take advantage, more successfully than any other system, of the opportunities
which the demand for social and technical selection characteristic
of modern societies gave it in order to realize the potentialities of
autonomy is objectively
its own logic, we must also take into account the particular past ofthe
educational institution, whose relative ex-
147Exclusion and Selection
pressed in its capacity at each moment in history to retranslate and
reinterpret external demands in terms of the norms inherited from a
relatively autonomous history. If, unlike the mandarin system, the
French system is not able to enforce recognition of the hierarchy of
academic values as the official principle of every social hierarchy and
every hierarchy of values, it nonetheless succeeds in competing with the
other prinCiples of hierarchization, especially when its action of inculcating
the value of academic hierarchies is exerted on categories socially
disposed to recognize the institution's pedagogic authority_ Although
the adherence individuals give to school hierarchies and to the
scholastic cult of hierarchy is always related to the rank the School
gives them in its hierarchies, it depends primarily, on the one hand, on
the value system they owe to their social class of origin (the value
accorded to the School within this system being, itself, a function of
the degree to which that class's interests are linked to the School) and,
on the other hand, on the degree to which their market value and social
position depend on educational guarantees. This is why the school
system is most successful in imposing recognition of the value of itself
and its classifications when its action is applied to social classes or class
fractions who are unable to counterpose to it any rival principle of
hierarchy. This is one of the mechanisms which enable the academic
institution to attract students from the middle classes or the intellectual
fraction of the big bourgeoisie into the teaching profession, diverting
them from aspiring to rise in other hierarchies, e.g of money or power,
and thus from cashing their academic credentials into economic and
social profit like students from the big bourgeoisie of business or
power, who are better placed to relativize academic judgements.
I 2
Thus, protest against the material and social conditions of teachers,
or bitter, self-righteous denunciation of the compromises and corruptions
of unscrupulous politicians and businessmen, doubtless expresses,
in the mode of moral indignation, the revolt of the subordinate
and middle-rank executives of education against a society incapable of
fully honouring its debts towards the School, i.e. towards those who
owe everything to the School, including the conviction that the School
148 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
ought to be the principle of every economic and social hierarchy.
Among the senior executives of the University, the Jacobin Utopia of a
social order in which everyone would be rewarded according to merit,
i.e. according to his School rank, cohabits with the aristocratic pretension
to recognize no other values than those of the institution which
alone fully recognizes their value and the pedagogocratic ambition of
subjecting all acts of civil and political life to the moral magisterium of
the University.13
It can be seen how the French system has been able to find in the
external demand for mass-produced, guaranteed, interchangeable 'products'
the opportunity to perpetuate while making it serve another
social function related to the interests and ideals of other social classes
- the tradition of competition for competition's sake, inherited from
the eighteenth-century Jesuit colleges which made emulation the
favoured tool of an education designed for .aristocratic youth.1 4 The
French University always tends to go beyond the technical function of
the competitive examination and to solemnly draw up, within the
quota of candidates it is asked to elect, hierarchies based on the
imponderables of derisory quarter points. Derisory no doubt, but
decisive: consider the weight the academic world attaches in its assessments
- often fraught with professional consequences - to the rank
attained in the entrance examinations taken in late adolescence, or even
to the title of 'cacique' or 'major', first in a hierarchy itself situated in a
hierarchy of hierarchies, that of the grandes ecoles and the major
concours. Max Weber observed that if one set aside the Confucian
tradition of the literary gentleman, the technical defmition of the
official posts of the imperial administration did not explain how the
mandarin examinations were able give such prominence to poetry;
similarly, in order to understand how a simple demand for vocational
selection, imposed by the need to choose the most suitable persons to
fill a limited number of specialized posts, could have served as a pretext
for the typically French religion of classification, it is necessary to
relate academic culture to the social universe in which it was formed,
that is to say, to the protected, self-enc1osed microcosm in which,
through the methodical, enveloping organization of competition and
149Exclusion and Selection
the establishment of scholastic hierarchies which were as prevalent in
play as in work, the Jesuits fashioned a homo hierarchicus, transposing
the aristocratic cult of 'glory' into the order of social success, literary
prowess and scholastic triumph.
But explanation in terms of survival explains nothing unless one
explains why the survival survives by establishing the functions it
performs in the present functioning of the educational system and by
showing the historical conditions authorizing or favouring the manifestation
of the generic tendencies the system owes to its essential
function. When seeking to explain the French system's very special
capacity to decree and impose hierarchies, even beyond the specifically
academic spheres of activity and sometimes against the most patent
demands it is supposed to answer, one cannot fail to observe that in its
teaching and examining it still today gives pride of place to the
self-perpetuation and self-protection of the teaching qorps, functions
which were served in a more open fashion by the examinations of the
medieval University, all defined in terms of entry into the corps or
into the course of study giving access to it, the baccalaureat (a lower
form of the inceptio), the licentia docendi, and the maftrise, marked by
the inceptio, a ceremony of induction into the corporation with the
rank of maitre. 1 5 It is sufficient to observe that most countries'
university systems have broken more fully with the medieval tradition
than have the French system and some others, e.g. those of Austria,
Spain or Italy, which similarly underwent the educational influence of
the Jesuits, in order to grasp the role played by the eighteenth-century
colleges. Endowed by the Jesuits with particularly effective means of
imposing the academic cult of hierarchy and inculcating an autarkic
culture cut off from life, the French educational system was able to
develop its generic tendency towards autonomization to the point of
subordinating its whole functioning to the demands of selfperpetuation.l
6 This tendency towards autonomizat on found the
social conditions for its full realization in that it fell in with the
interests of the petty bourgeoisie and the intellectual fractions of the
bourgeoisie, who found in the Jacobin ideology of formal equality of
150 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
opportunity new strength for their exacerbated impatience with all
forms of 'favouritism' and 'nepotism'; and also in that it was able to
take advantage of the centralized structure of the State bureaucracy
which, in calling forth a proliferation of national, externally marked,
anonymous examinations and competititions, gave the school institution
the perfect opportunity to secure recognition of its monopoly in
the production and imposition of a unitary hierarchy or, at least,
hierarchies reducible to the same principle. I 7
In the French system, the concours is the fully realized form of the
examination (which university practice always tends to treat as a
competition) and the competition for the recruitment of secondary
school teachers, the agregation, constitutes, together with those advance
recruitment competitions, the Concours Gem?ral and the Ecole
Norma/e Superieure entrance examination, the archetypal triad in
which the University acknowledges its authentic self and of which all
other competitions and examinations are but variously distant emanations
and more or less deformed copies.1s The ambition of the teaching
corps to impose universal recognition of university credentials, and in
particular the absolute supremacy of that supreme credential, the
agregation, is most clearly seen in the action of the pressure groups of
which the Societe des agreges is merely the least clandestine expression,
and which have succeeded in securing a de facto recognition of this
strictly scholastic title out of all proportion ,to its de jure definition.
The vocational profitability of the titles of agrege and ex-student of the
ENS is manifested in the very many cases in which they are used as
unofficial 'Criteria for co-option: 15 percent of the holders of Arts
Faculty professorships or maitre de conferences posts (not to mention
the assistants and maftres-assistants, making up 48 percent of the
university staff) do not have the doctorat, the degree theoretically
required, whereas they are virtually all agreges and 23 percent of them
are nonnaliens. If homo academicus par excellence is the normalienagrege-docteur,
i.e. the actual or potential Sorbonne professor, this is
because he combines all the titles defining the rarity which the University
produces, promotes and protects. Nor is it an accident that in
151Exclusion and Selection
the agregation, as if carried away by its tendency to reinterpret external
demand, the University institution can even go so far as to deny the
very content of that demand: not uncommonly the agregation jury,
faced with the eternal threat of 'declining standards', sets the imperative
of 'quality' over the necessity, felt as a profane interference, of
filling all the vacant posts, and sets up, so to speak, through comparison
with previous years, a competition between competitions that will yield
the yardstick, or rather, the essence of the agrege -- even if this means
refusing the means, elsewhere demanded, of perpetuating the real
University, in the name of the exigencies of the self-perpetuation of the
ideal University.1 9
To understand fully the functional significance of the agregation,
one would have to reinstate this institution in the system of transformations
which examinations, or more precisely the system they constitute,
have undergone: if it is true that, in an academic system dominated by
the imperative of self-perpetuation, the degree par excellence corresponds
to the examination which gives access qua master to the order of
teaching most representative of the profession, i.e. secondary education,
it follows that, in each historical conjuncture, it is the examination
best placed to symbolize that function which holds, both in reality
and in ideology, the positional value of examination par excellence,
that is to say, successively in the history of the University, the doctorat,
the licence and now the agregation, which, despite the apparent preeminence
of the doctorat, owes to its relationship with secondary
education and its character as a recruitment competition not only its
ideological force but also its weight in the organization of careers and
more generally in the functioning of the University.20 Everything takes
place as if the school system had made use of the new possibilities
offered by each new state of the system of examinations, resulting from
the duplication of an existing examination, in order to express the same
objective meaning. ,
)
To regard the present state of the University as the contingent
outcome of a succession of disparate, discontinuous events in which
only retrospective illusion could create the impression of a pre­
152 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
established hannony between the system and the legacy of history,
would be to ignore what is implied in the relative autonomy of the
educational system. The evolution of the school system depends not
only on the strength of external constraints but also on the coherence
the
of its structures, that is, both the resistance it can counterpose to events
and its power to select and reinterpret accidents and influences in
accordance with a logic whose general principles are laid down as soon
as the function of inculcating a culture inherited from the past is taken
in hand by a specialized institution served by a body of specialists. Thus
the history of a relatively autonomous system presents itself as
history of the systematizations to which the system subjects the constraints
and innovations it encounters, in accordance with the norms
which deftne it as a system.2
1
EXAMINATION AND UNEXAMINED
EXCLUSION
We have had to grant the educational system the autonomy it asserts
and manages to maintain in the face of external demands, in order to
understand the characteristics of its functioning that it derives from its
essential function. But were we to take its declarations of independence
too literally, we should be in danger of losing sight of its external
functions and particularly the social functions which academic selection
and hierarchization always additionally perfonn, even when they seem
to be exclusively obeying the logic, and even the pathology, proper to
the educational system. Thus, for example, the apparently purely
academic cult of hierarchy always contributes to the defence and
legitimation of social hierarchies, because academic hierarchies, whether
of degrees and diplomas or establishments and disciplines, always owe
something to the social hierarchies which they tend to re-produce (in
both senses). So it has to be asked whether the freedom the educational
system is given to enforce its own standards and its own hierarchies, at
153Exclusion and Selection
the expense for example of the most evident demands of the economic
system, is not the quid pro quo of thehidden services it renders to certain
classes by concealing social selection under the guise of technical
selection and legitimating the reproduction of the social hierarchies by
transmuting them into academic hierarchies.
Indeed, one begins to suspect that the functions of the examination
are not reducible to the services it perfonns for the institution, still less
to the satisfactions it gives the teaching staff, as soon as one observes
that most of those excluded from studying at the various levels of
education eliminate themselves before being examined, and that the
proportion of those whose elimination is thus masked by the selection
overtly carried out differs according to social class. In every country,
the inequalities between the classes are incomparably greater when
measured by the probabilities ofcandidature (calculated on the basis of
the proportion of children in each social class who reach a given
educational level, after equivalent previous achievement) than when
measured by the probabilities of passing. 22 Thus, previous perfonnances
being equal, pupils of working-class origin are more likely to
'eliminate themselves' from secondary education by declining to enter
it than to eliminate themselves once they have entered, and a fortiori
more likely not to enter than to be eliminated from it by the explicit
sanction of examination failure?3 Moreover, those who do not eliminate
themselves at the moment of moving from one stage to another are
more likely to enter those branches (establishments or sections) from
which there is least chance of entering the next level of education; so
that when the examination seems to eliminate them, it most often
merely ratifies that other fonn of advance self-elimination which relegation
to a second-order branch, a deferred elimination, in fact amounts
to.
The opposition between the 'passed' and the 'failed' is the source of
a false perspective on the educational system as a lecting agency.
Based on a candidate's experience (actual or potential, direct or mediate,
past or present), this opposition between the two sub-sets
separated by selection in the examination from within the set of
154
those successfully completing it, neglecting to examine the relation
between those who leave one stage and those who enter the next one.
To apprehend the latter relation it is sufficient to look at the whole
process of selectiun from the point of view which, if the system did not
impose its own point of view on them, would be that of the social
classes condemned to immediate or deferred self-elimination. What
makes this reversal of the problematic difficult is that it requires
something more and other than a simple logical conversion: if the
question of examination failure rates holds the limelight (consider the
reactions to a change in the baccalaureat pass rate), it does so because
those who have the means to pose this question belong to the social
classes for whom the risk of elimination can only come from the
examination.
There are several ways of missing the sociological significance of the
differential educational mortality rate of the different social classes.
Technocratic research, which is only interested in the problem inasmuch
as the abandonment of a course by a proportion of the pupils
who enter it has a manifest economic cost, immediately reduces it to a
false problem -of exploiting 'abandoned reserves of intelligence'; such
grasp the numerical relation between those com­research can even
Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
candidates hides the relation between this set and its complement (Le.
the set of non-candidates), thereby ruling out any inquiry into the
hidden criteria of the election of those from whom the examination
ostensibly makes its selection. A good deal of research on the educational
system as an agency of continuous selection (drop-out) simply
takes over this opposition from spontaneous sOciology when it takes for
its object the relation between those entering a stage of schooling and
pleting each stage and those entering the next, and see the weight and
social range of the self-elimination of the disadvantaged classes, without
going beyond negative explanation in terms of 'lack of motivation'. In
the absence of analysis of what the resigned withdrawal of the members
of the working classes from the School owes to the functioning and
functions of the educational system as an agency of selection, elimination
and concealment of elimination under selection, all that techno-
155
which subtend the seemingly most neutral scientific choices. Thus some
writers reduce educational inequalities to social inequalities, ignoring
the specific form they take in the logic of the educational system, while
others tend to treat the School as an empire within an empire, whether,
like the docimologists,24 they reduce the problem of equality before
the examination to that of normalizing the distribution of marks or
critics, they reduce the conservative function of the University to the
conservatism of academics.
Seeking to explain why the fraction of the school population which
eliminates itself before entering the secondary stage or during that stage
is not randomly distributed among the different social classes, one is
condemned to an explanation in terms of characteristics which remain
individual, even when imputed equally to all individuals in a category,
so long as one fails to see that they befall the social class as such only in
and through its relation to the school system. Even when it seems to be
tion' of the teacher-pupil relation, or whether, like so many hasty
and the school system, one is condemned to the ideological options
equalizing their variance, or whether, like some social psychologists,
they identify the 'democratization' of education with the 'democratizaExclUSion
and Selection
cratic research is able to see in the statistics of educational opportunity
which highlight the unequal representation of the different social
classes in the different stages and types of education, is the manifestation
of an isolated relationship between scholastic performance, taken
at face value, and the series of advantages or disadvantages deriving
from social origin. In short, if one fails to take as one's explanatory
principle the system of relations between the structure of class relations
imposed by the strength of a 'vocation' or the discovery of inability,
each individual act of choice by which a child excludes himself from
access to a stage of education or resigns himself to relegation to a
devalorized type of course takes account of the ensemble of the
objective relations (which pre-existed this choice 3Rd will outlast it)
between his social class and the educational system,since a scholastic
future is of greater or lesser probability for a given individual only
insofar as it constitutes the objective and collective future of his class or
156 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
categOIY. This is why the structure of the objective chances of social
upgrading according to class of origin and, more precisely, the structure
of the chances of upgrading through education, conditions agents'
dispositions towards education and towards upgrading through education
- dispositions which in tum play a determining role in defining the
likelihood of entering education, adhering to its norms and succeeding
in it, hence the likelihood of social upgrading.2s Thus, the objective
probability of entering this or that stage of education that is attached
to a class is not just an expression of the unequal representation of the
different classes in the stage of education considered, a simple mathematical
device merely enabling one to evaluate the magnitude of the
inequalities more precisely or more eloquently; rather, it is a theoretical
construction providing one of the most powerful principles of explanation
of these inequalities. The subjective expectation which leads an
individual to drop out depends directly on the conditions determining
the objective chances of success proper to his category, so that it must
be counted among the mechanisms which contribute to the actualization
of objective probabilities.26 The concept of subjective expectation,
conceived as the product of the internalization of objective
conditions through a process governed by the whole system of objective
relations within which it takes place, has the theoretical function of
designating the intersection of the different systems of relations those
linking .the educational system to the cll)sS structure and also
those set up between the system of these objective relations and the
system of dispositions (ethos) which characterizes each social agent
(individual or group), inasmuch as when agents make up their minds,
they always, albeit unwittingly, make reference to the system of the
objective relations which make up their situation. Explanation in terms
of the relationship between subjective expectation and objective probability,
i.e. in terms of the system of the relations between two systems
of relations, is able to account, on the basis of the same principle, not
only for the educational mortality of the working classes or the survival
of a fraction of those classes, together with the particular modality of
the survivors' attitude towards the system, but also for the variation in
157Exclusion and Selection
the attitudes of pupils from the different social classes towards work or
success, depending on the degree of probability and improbability of
their continuing into a given stage of education. Similarly, if the rate of
working-class enrolment varies, from region to region, with the rate of
enrolment of the other classes, and if urban residence, with the consequent
social heterogeneity of acquaintance groups, is associated with
a higher rate of working-class enrolment, this is because the subjective
expectation of these classes is never independent of the objective
probability characteristic of the acquaintance group (allowing for the
reference groups or aspiration groups it contains), a fact which helps to
increase the educational chances of the working classes, at least insofar
as the gap between the objective probabilities attached to the reference
or aspiration group and the objective class probabilities is not such as to
discourage any identification or even reinforce the acceptance of exclusion
('That's not for the likes of US').2 7
Thus, to give a full account of the selection process which takes
place either within the educational system or by reference to the
system, we must take into account not only the explicit judgements of
the academic tribunal, but also the convictions by default or suspended
sentences which the working classes inflict on themselves by eliminating
themselves from the outset or by condemning themselves to eventual
elimination when they enter the branches which carry the poorest
chances of escaping a negative verdict on examination. By an apparent
paradox, university science courses, in which success seems at first sight
to depend less directly on the possession of inherited cultural capital
and which constitute the inevitable culmination of the sections admitting
the highest proportion of working-class children on entry to
secondary education, do not have a Significantly more democratic
intake than other types of faculty course.28 In reality, not only is the
relation to language and culture continuously taken into account
throughout secondary education and even (doubtless to a lesser extent
"
and at any rate less overtly) in higher education, not only are logical
and symbolic mastery of abstract operations and, more precisely,
mastery of the laws of transformation of complex structures, a function
158 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
of the type of practical mastery of language and the type of language
acquired in the home but the organization and functioning of the
school system continuously and through multiple codes retranslate
inequalities in social level into inequalities in academic leveL Given that,
at every stage, the educational system establishes among the disciplines
or subjects a de facto hierarchy which runs, in Science Faculties for
example, from pure mathematics to the natural sciences (or, in Arts
Faculties, from literature and philosophy to geography), i.e. from those
intellectual activities perceived as the most abstract to the most
concrete; given that this hierarchy is retranslated, at the level of school
organization, into the hierarchy of types of secondary school (from the
lycee down to the College d'Enseignement Technique, through the
College d'Enseignement General and the College d'Enseignement
Secondaire) and the hierarchy of sections (from classical to technical);
given that this hierarchy of schools and sections is closely connected,
through the mediation of the correspondence between the hierarchy of
degrees and the hierarchy of schools, with the hierarchy of the teachers'
social origins; and given, finally, that the different branches and different
schools attract pupils of different social classes very unequally, in
accordance with their previous academic success and the classdifferentiated
social definitions of the types of course and types of
schools - it can be seen why the different types of curriculum give very
unequal chances of entering higher education. It follows that workingclass
children pay the price of their access to secondary education by
relegation into institutions and school careers which entice them with
the false pretences of apparent homogeneity only to ensnare them in a
truncated educational destiny.2 \I
Thus, the combination of the educational chances of the different
classes and the chances of subsequent success attached to the different
sections and types of schools constitutes a mechanism of deferred
selection which transmutes a social inequality into a specifically educational
inequality, i.e. an inequality of 'level' or success, concealing and
academically consecrating an inequality of chances of access to the
highest levels of education.30
159Exclusion a,!d Selection
It may be objected that democratization of secondary education
intake tends to reduce the role of self-elimination since the probability
of working -class children entering secondary education'has Significantly
increased over the last few years. But one has to set against this the
statistics of admission to higher education according to school or
section of origin, which indicate a social and educational opposition
between the 'noble' sections of the 'noble' secondary establishments
and second-order secondary education, perpetuating in a better concealed
form the old cleavage between the lycee and extended primary
education.31 Furthermore, in reducing the role of self-elimination at
the end of primary schooling, in favour of deferred elimination or
elimination by examination alone, the educational system fulfils its
conservative function yet more successfully, if it is true that, to perform
this function, it must disguise chances of entry as chances of
success. Those who invoke 'the interest of society' to deplore the
economic cost of 'educational wastage' contradict themselves in failing
to take into account the profit accruing from it, namely the advantage
the social order derives from spacing out and so concealing the elimination
of the working classes.
It is clear why, in order to carry out in full this function of social
conservation, the school system must present the 'moment of truth' of
the examination as its own objective reality; the elimination, subject
solely to the norms of educational equity, which it undertakes and
conducts with formal irreproachability, conceals the performance of
the function of the school system by masking, behind the opposition
between the passed and the failed, the relation between the candidates
and those whom the system has de facto excluded from the ranks of
the candidates, and so concealing the links between the school system
and the structure of class relations, Like the spontaneous sociology
which understands the system as the system asks to be understood, a
number of would-be scientific analyses, which allow the same autonomization
to be foisted upon them and adopt the .Jtry logic of the
examination, consider only those who are in the system at a given
moment, excluding those who have been excluded from it. But the
160 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
relationship of each of those remaining in the system to his whole social
class of origin dominates and informs his relationship to the system: his
behaviour, aptitudes, and dispositions towards school bear the stamp of
his whole academic past, because they owe their characteristics to the
degree of probability or improbability of his still being within the
system, at that stage and in that branch. Thus, mechanical use of
multivariate analysis might lead one to deny the influence of social
origin on academic success, at least in higher education, on the grounds,
for example, that the primary relation between social origin and success
disappears when each of the two categories of students defined by a
'classical' or 'modem' secondary training is considered separately.32
But that would be to ignore the specific logic by which social
advantages and disadvantages are progressively retranslated, through
successive selections, into educational advantages or disadvantages and,
more concretely, it would be to neglect the specifically educational
characteristics, such as type of school, section entered in sixitlme, etc.
which relay the influence of social origin. One only has to compare the
examination success rate of students combining the most improbable
characteristics for their class of origin, e.g. working-class students from
a big Paris lycee having done Greek and Latin and having the best
previous results (if indeed this is not a blank category), with the success
rate of students endowed with the same educational characteristics but
belonging to a social class for which these charas;teristics are the most
prObable ones (students from the Parisian bourgeoisie, for example), to
observe the disappearance or even reversal of the relation which prevails
in most case between pOSition in the social hierarchy and academic
success.33 But this finding remains meaningless and even a source of
absurdities until the relation ascertained is reinstated in the complete
system of the relations and of their transformations in the course of the
successive selections which have led to the compounding of improbabilities
which bestows its exceptional success on a group characterized
by a cumulation of successive over-selections.
Analysis even multivariate analysis of the relations observed at a
given point in time between the characteristics of categories of a
161Exclusion and Selection
student body which is the product of a series of selections taking into
account these same characteristics or,' to put it another way, is the
product of a series of 'draws' biased with respect to the variables
considered (primarily social origin, sex and place of residence) grasps
only misleading relations unless one is careful to reintroduce not only
the unequal degrees of selectedness capable of hiding the inequalities of
selection, but also the differential dispositions which differential selections
produce in those selected.
A purely synchronic approach inevitably sees a set of absolute
probabilities, redefined ex nmilo at each stage of education, in what is
in fact a series of conditional probabilities throughout which the initial
probability (of which perhaps the best indicator at present is the
probability of entering secondary education in this or that section
according to social origin) has been progressively specified and limited.
By the same token, such an approach is unable to give a full account
of the dispositions characteristic of the different categories of students.
'Attitudes' such as bourgeois students' dilbttantism, self-assurance and
irreverent ease, or working-class students' tense application and educational
realism can only be understood as a function of the probability
or improbability of occupying the position occupied which defines the
objective structure of the subjective experience of the 'wonderboy' or
the 'inheritor'.34 In short, what offers itself to be grasped, at every
point on the curve, is the slope of the curve; in other words, the whole
curve.35 If it is true that the relation an individual maintains with the
School and with the culture it transmits is more or less 'effortless',
'brilliant', 'natural', 'laboured', 'tense' or 'dramatic', according to the
probability of his survival in the system, and if it is also the case that in
their verdicts the School and 'society' take as much account of the
relation to culture as of culture, then it is clear how much remains
unintelligible until one goes to the principle underlying the production
of the most durable academic and social differences"the habitus the
generative, unifying principle of conducts and opinions which is also
their explanatory principle, since at every moment of an educational or
intellectual biography it tends to reproduce the system of objective
conditions of which it is the product.
162 Reproduction: In /<.aucation. Society and Culture
Thus an analysis of the functions of the examination which seeks to
break with spontaneous sociology, i.e. with the misleading images the
educational system tends to offer of its own functioning and functions,
must lead one to discard purely docimological inquiry, which continues
to serve the hidden functions of the examination, in favour of the
systematic study of the mechanisms of elimination as a privileged locus
in which to apprehend the relations between the functioning of the
educational system and the perpetuation of the structure of class
relations. Nothing is better designed than the examination to inspire
universal recognition of the legitimacy of academic verdicts and of the
social hierarchies they legitimate, since it leads the self-eliminated to
count themselves among those who fail, while enabling those elected
from among a small number of eligible candidates to see in their
election the proof of a merit or 'gift' which would have caused them to
be preferred to all comers in any circumstances. Qnly when the examination
is seen to have the function of concealing the elimination which
takes place without examination, can it be fully understood why so
many features of its operation as an overt selecting procedure still obey
the logic governing the elimination which it conceals.
When one knows how much examiners' judgements owe to implicit
or
Proust
norms which retranslate and specify the values of the dominant classes
in terms of the logic proper to the' educational system, it is clear that
candidates are handicapped in proportion to the di tance between these
values and those of their class of origin.36 Class bias is strongest in
those tests which throw the examiner onto the implicit, diffuse criteria
of the traditiorral art of grading, such as the dissertation or the oral, an
occasion for passing total judgements, armed with the unconscious
criteria of social perception on total persons, whose moral and intellectual
qualities are grasped through the infinitesimals of style
manners, accent or elocution, posture or mimicry, even clothing and
cosmetics; not to mention orals like those of the Ecole Nationale
d'Administration or the literature agregation, where the examiners
al:nl0 t explicitly insist on the right to implicit criteria, whether bourgeois
ease and distinction or university tone and breeding.3 7
163Exclusion and Selection
remarks that 'on the telephone you discover the inflections of a voice
which you couIti not distinguish until it was dissociated from the face
in which you objectified its expression'. In the same way, only experimental
decomposition of the examiner's syncretic judgement can reveal
all that a judgement formulated in the context of an examination owes
to the system of social marks which constitutes the objective basis of
the examiner's sense of the candidate's 'presence' or 'insignificance'.
But it should not be supposed that formal rationalization of the
criteria and techniques of judgement would suffice to free the examination
from its social functions: that is what the docimologists seem to
ignore when, fascinated by the two-fold inconsistency of examiners
unable to agree with one other because they are unable to agree with
themselves on the criteria of judgement, they forget that different
judges could, theoretically, agree on judgements that were identically
biased because based on the same implicit criteria, if they had in
common all the social and academic characteristics determining their
grading. In drawing attention to the haven of irrationality which examinations
represent, the docimoiogists bring to light the discrepancy
between the ideology of equity and the reality of selection processes
but, failing to inquire into the social functions of such 'irrational'
procedures, they are liable to make further contributions to the exercise
of these functions by diffusing the belief that a rationalization of
grading would suffice to harness examinations to the service of the
declared functions of the School and the examination.3 8
Thus, in order for the examination to fulfil to perfection its function
of legitimating the cultural heritage and, through it, the established
order, it would be sufficient for the Jacobin confidence that so many
French academics have in national, anonymous competition to be
extended to measurement techniques which have in their favour all the
outward signs of scientificity and neutrality. Nothing would better
serve this function of sociodicy39 than formally iqeproachable tests
, ,
which could claim to measure, at a given point in time, the subjects'
aptitude to occupy vocational posts, while forgetting that this aptitude,
however early it is tested, is the product of a SOcially qualified teaching
164 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
and learning. and that the most predictive measurements are precisely
the least neutral ones socially. In fact, nothing less than the neoParetian
Utopia of a society protected against the 'circulation of the
elites' and the 'revolt of the masses' can be read between the lines of
some descriptions which present tests as the privileged tool and guarantee
of American democracy qua meritocracy:
One conceivable consequence of a greater reliance on tested ability as a
criterion for the assignment of educational or occupational status is a more
rigid class structure based on ability. The contribution of inheritance to ability
and the extensive use of objective selection tests may accentuate the position
of the individual born to parents of low ability. The fact that individuals tend
to choose marriage partners from the same social stratum makes it likely tha
over time it will become more, rather than less, difficult for an individual to
improve his social position over that of his parents.4 0
And when these utopists describe the 'demoralizing' effects such a
system of selection would inevitably have on the members of the 'lower
classes', who, like the 'deltas' in Brave New World, would be obliged to
acknowledge that they are the lowest of the low and happy to be so,
perhaps the only reason why they over-estimate the capacity of tests to
grasp natural abilities is that they under-estimate the ability of the
School to accredit the natural character of abilities or inabilities.
TECHNICAL SELECTION 

AND SOCIAL SELECTION 

Thus it may be that an educational system is more capable of concealing
its social function of legitimating class differences behind its
technical function of producing qualifications, the less able it is to
ignore the incompressible demands of the labour market. Doubtless
modem societies are more and more successful in getting the School to
produce, and guarantee as such, more and more skilled individuals, i.e.
agents better and better qualified for the demands of the economy; but
165Exclusion and Selcction
this restriction of the autonomy imparted to the educational system is
no doubt more apparent than real, insofar as the raising of the mini.
mum level of technical qualification required for occupational purposes
does not, ipso facto, entail a reduction of the gap between the technical
qualification guaranteed by the examination and the social quality
which it bestows by what might be called its certification effect.
A system of education consistent with the norms of technocratic
ideology can, at least as successfully as a traditional system, confer on
the academic scarcity which it produces or decrees by means of the
diploma a social scarcity relatively independent of the skills demanded
by the post to which the diploma gives legitimate access: it is this alone
which explains why so many professional posts can be occupied, on
different terms and with unequal remuneration, by individuals who
(assuming the hypothesis most favourable to the reliability of the
diploma) differ only in the degree to which they have been consecrated
by school and university. Every organization has its 'stand-ins', condemned
to a subordinate position by their lack of academic qualifications
although their technical competence makes them indispensable,
and everyone is familiar with the competition which exists between
categories separated in the administrative hierarchy by their educational
label although they perform the same technical tasks (such as engineers
from different schools or the numerous categories of secondary
teachers). If the principle of 'equal pay for equal work' can serve to
justify hierarchies which, if it were taken literally, it would seem to
contradict, this is because the value of a professional production is
always socially perceived as related to the value of the producer and the
latter in tum is seen as a function of the academic value of his
qualifications. In short, the diploma tends to prevent the relation
between the diploma and occupational status from being related to the
more uncertain relation between capacity and status; if this connection
were made, it would raise the question of the relation between capacity
and the diploma and so lead to a questioning of the hability of the
diploma, i.e. of everything that is legitimated by recognition of the
reliability of diplomas. Modem bureaucracies are in fact defending the
166 Reproduction: In Education. Society and Culture
very principles on which their organization and hierarchies are based
when they appear to contradict their most visible interests in failing to
test the technical content of their agents' academic qualifications,
because they could not submit individuals certified by the diploma to
tests liable to endanger them, without also endangering the legitimacy
of the diploma and of all the hierarchies it legitimates. Equally it is to
the necessity of masking the gap between the technical skills actually
guaranteed by the diploma and the social profitability of its certification
effect that the ideology of 'general culture' corresponds, its
primary function perhaps being to make it impossible, de facto and de
jure, for the 'cultivated man' ever to be called upon to supply technical
proof of his culture. It is understandable that the classes who objectively
monopolize a relation to culture defined as indefinable
(because it can be objectively defined only by this de facto monopoly)
are predisposed to extract the maximum profit from the certification
effect and have every interest in defending the ideology of disinterested
culture which legitimates this effect by dissimulating it.41 By the same
token, one sees the social functions of the ostentatious squandering of
teaching and learning which defines the mode of acquisition of those
aptitudes worthy of belonging to general culture, whether it be the
acquisition of the classical languages, conceived as a necessarily slow
initiation into the ethical and logical virtues of 'humanism' or complacent
drilling in every sort of formalism, literary, aesthetic, logical or
mathematical. .
,
If every selecting operation always has the indissolubly two-fold
effect of regulating technical qualifications by reference to the demands
of the labour market and of creating social grades by reference to the
structure of class relations which the educational system helps to
perpetuate, if" in short, the School has both a technical function of
producing and attesting capacities and a social function of conserving
power and privileges, it can be seen that modern societies furnish the
educational system with vastly increased opportunities to exercise its
power of transmuting social advantages into academic advantages,
themselves convertible into social advantages, because they allow it to
167Exclusion and Selection
present academic, hence implicitly social, requirements as technical
prerequisites for the exercise of an occupation.42 Thus, when Max
Weber associated rationalization of selection and recruitment procedures
with the development of the great modern bureaucracies and
their ever growing demand for experts trained for specific tasks, he
overestimated the autonomy of the technical functions of both the
educational system and the bureaucratic system relative to their social
functions. In reality, the top ranks of the French Civil Service have
perhaps never before so totally recognized and consecrated the most
general and even the most diffuse dispositions, at any rate those most
resistent to rational formulation and codification, and never before so
completely subordinated specialists, experts and technicians to the
specialists-on-general-matters graduating from the most prestigious
grandes ecoles.":1
In ever more completely delegating the power of selection to the
academic institution, the privileged classes are able to appear to be
surrendering to a perfectly neutral authority the power of transmitting
power from one generation to another, and thus to be renouncing the
arbitrary privilege of the hereditary transmission of privileges. But
through its formally irreproachable verdicts, which always objectively
serve the dominant classes since they never sacrifice the technical
interests of those classes except to the advantage of their social
interests, the School is better able than ever, at all events in the only
way conceivable in a society wedded to democratic ideologies, to
contribute to the reproduction of the established order, since it succeeds
better than ever in concealing the function it performs. The
mobility of individuals, far from being incompatible with reproduction
of the structure of class relations, can help to conserve that structure,
by guaranteeing social stability through the controlled selection of a
limited number of individuals - modified in and for individual upgrading
- and so giving credibility to the ideology of social mobility
whose most accomplished expression is the school i ology of "1'Ecole
Uberatrice", the school as a liberating force.44
168 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
NOTES
1. Examiners' reports on the concours for the agregation or entry to the
grandes ecoles therefore constitute exemplary documents for anyone seeking the
criteria by which the teaching corps trains and selects those it considers worthy of
perpetuating it: these sermons for the academic seminary set out the grounds for
verdicts betraying, in their murky clarity. the values which guide the examiners'
choices and on which the candidates' training has to be patterned.
2. The effects of scholastic programming can be found in the most unexpected
areas: when the French Public Opinion Institute (IFOP) asks its interviewees
to say 'whether the progress of modem science in the field of atomic
energy will do humanity more harm than good or more good than harm', what is
the opinion poll but a national examination resurrecting a question put a
thousand times in a thousand scarcely different forms to school-leaving certificate,
baccalaureat or Concours General candidates, 'the moral value of scientific
progress'? And do not the alternatives offered in the precoding of the replies
(more good than harm; more harm than good; as much good as harm) evoke the
reach-me-down dialectic of three-point dissertations in which, after a laborious
forcing of arguments for and against, a triumphant synthesis climbs onto the
fence and faces both ways?
3. A more extended analysis of the function of intellectual and moral
integration which every educational system fulftls by inculcating common forms
of expression which are also common principles of organization of thought, can
be found in P. Bourdieu, 1967,2.
4. E. Renan, 'L'instruction publique en France jugee par les Allemands',
QUestions conremporaines, p. 266.
5. E. Durkheim, L 'evolution pedagogique en Franr:e, Paris, Alcan, 1938, p.
161.
6. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans., ed. and introd. H. H. Gerth
and C. Wright Mills, London, Kegan Paul, 1947, pp. 240 ff.
7. In the US, for example, statistics show a continuous increase in the
proportion of members of the ruling categories who are graduates, and graduates
of the best universities, a tendency which has become more marked in recent
years. W. L. Warner and J. C. Abegglen (Big Business Leaders in America, New
York, Harper & Brothers, 1955, pp. 47-55) have shown that 'in 1928,32% of the
big business leaders were college graduates; in 1952,57%' (p. 47). In Fram:e, a
survey of a representative sample of personalities who had achieved fame in the
most diverse fields showed that 85 percent of them were graduates, a further 10
percent having completed secondary education (A. Girard, La reussite sociole en
France, ses caracteristiques, ses lois, ses effets, Paris, Institut Nationale d'Etudes
169Exclusion and Selection
Demographiques, P.U.F., 1961, pp. 233-59). A recent survey of the leaders of
large industrial organizations established that 89 percent of French managing
directors are graduates, as against 85 percent for the Belgians, 78 percent for the
Germans and Italians, 55 percent for the Dutch and 40 percent for the British
(,Portrait-robot du P.D.G. europeen', L'expansion. Nov. 1969, pp. 133-43). Research
is needed to see whether, in most French careers particularly those in
administration, the growth and cl)dification of the advantages attached to degrees
and diplomas have led to a decline in internal promotion, i.e. an increasing rarity
of senior executives promoted from the ranks and trained 'on the job'; the
opposition between the 'back door' and the 'front door', which roughly corresponds,
in an administrative organization, to the opposition between the petty
bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie, may well have been intensified as a result.
8. Confucian education tended to impose the traditional ideal of the 'literary
man'; 'Puns, euphemisms, allusions to classical quotations, and a rermed and
purely literary intellectuality were considered the conversational ideal of the
genteel man. All politics of the day were excluded from such conversation"It may
appear strange to us that this sublimated "salon" cultivation ["Salon "·Bildung I,
tied to the classics, should enable a man to administer large territories. And in
fact, one did not manage the administration with mere poetry even in China. But
the Chinese prebendary official proved his status quality, that is, his charisma,
through the canonical correctness of his literary forms. Therefore, considerable
weight was placed on these forms in official communications' (M. Weber, 'The
Chinese Literati', in From Max Weber: EsSI1ys in Sociology, p. 437).
9. Ibid., p. 434.
10. Ibid., p. 423.
11. Because the State gave it the means to enforce the overt supremacy of its
specific hierarchies, the mandarin system constitutes a privileged case: here the
School manifested in a codified law and a proclaimed ideology a tendency
towards the autonomization of academic values which is elsewhere expressed only
in a customary law and through multiple reinterpretations and rationa1.izations.
Even the function of scholastic legitimation of hereditary cultural privileges took
in this case a juridical form: this system, which claimed to accord the right to
office solely on the basis of personal merit, attested by examination, explicitly
reserved a privileged right of candidature for the sons of high-ranking officials.
12. It is in this light that one should intef1lret the statistics of entry to schools
such as the Ecole Normale Superieure or the Ecole Nationale d'Administration by
the candidates' social category of origin and previous academic success. Our
survey of the students of all the grandes ecoles shows, inter alia, that while the
ENS and the ENA both, and to much the same degree, have a much less
democratic intake than the faculties, since only 5.8 and 2.9 percent, respectively,
of their students are working-class (as against, for example, 22.7 percent in the
170 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
Arts Faculties and 17.1 percent in the Law Faculties), on closer analysis the preponderant
- category of privileged-class students (66.8 percent at the ENS and
72.8 percent at the ENA) exhibit characteristic differences: sons of teachers make
up 18.4 percent of the ENS intake, as against 9 percent at the ENA; sons of Civil
Servants make up 10 percent at the ENA, compared with 4.5 percent at the
ENS .... Moreover, the academic records of the students at the two schools
testify that the University is more successful in orienting pupils towards the
studies which most epitomize it (e.g. the ENS), the more clear-cut their previous
academic success has been (as measured by the number of bacca1aureat distinctions)
for a more extended analysis, see P. Bourdieu et al., Le systeme des
grandes ecoles et la reproduction des classes dominantes, in preparation.
13. Although it suggests only some of the relations linking the characteristics
of teachers' practice and ideology to their social origin, class membership and
position in the academic institution and the intellectual field, this analysis, like
the one presented below (Chapter 4, pp. 200-03), should suffice to warn the
reader against the temptation of taking the earlier descriptions of French teachers'
professional practice for analyses of essences (Chapter 2).
14. See E. Durkheim, L'evolutlon pedagogique, II, pp.69-117, followed up
by G. Snyders, La pedagogie en France au XVlJe et au XVIJIe siecles, Paris,
P.U.F., 1965.
15. The resistance to any attempt to dissociate the certificate sanctioning
completion of one stage of schooling from the right to enter the next stems, as
can be seen in the polemics over the baccalaureat, from a conception of the
school career as a unilinear trajectorY culminating, in its accomplished form, in
the agregation. Indignant refusal to award 'cheap' certificates, which has recently
tended to draw on the technocratic language of adapting the University to the
employment market, can readily ally itself with the traditionalist ideology which
would extend 'the criteria of the specifically academic guarantee to everY certificate
of proficiency, in order to safeguard the means of creating and controlling
the conditions of academic 'rarity'. The pre-eminence of the royal road is such
that all acadelnic careers, and a number of professional careers which do not
follow it all the way through, can only be defmed in terms of lack.Such a system
is thus particularly prone to produce 'failures', condemned by the University
which has condemned them to maintain an ambivalent relation to it.
16. The . teaching of the Jesuits should doubtless be seen as the source of most
of the systematic differences which distinguish the intellectual 'temperament' of
the Catholic countries marked by its influence from that of the Protestant
countries. As Renan points out, 'the French University has too much imitated the
Jesuits, with their insipid harangues and Latin verses; it recalls too much the
rheton of declining Rome. The great French fault of perorating, the tendency to
make everYthing degenerate into declamation, is kept up by the stubborn in-
Exclusion and Selection 171
sistence by a part of the University on disdaining the content of knowledge and
valuing only style and talent' (E.Renan, Questions contemporaines, p. 79). Those
who directly attribute the dominant characteristics of a nation's intellectual
production to the values of the dominant religion, e.g. an interest in the experimental
sciences or philological SCholarship to Protestantism, or the taste for
belles-lettres to Catholicism, omit to analyse the specifically pedagogic effect of
the retranslation performed by a determinate type of school organization. When
Renan sees in the 'pseudo-humanist' teaching of the Jesuits, and in the 'literary
mind' it encourages, one of the fundamental features of the mode of thought and
expression of French intellectuals, he brings out the consequences for French
intellectual Ufe of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which halted the
scientffic movement that had got under way in the first half of the seventeenth
century and 'put an end to historical criticsm': 'With the literary mind alone
encouraged, there ensued a certain frivolity.Holland and Germany, partly thanks
to our exiles, built up a near monopoly of scholarship. It was decided then that
France would be above all a nation of men of wit, a nation writing well, talking
wonderfully, but inferior in knowledge of things and exposed to all the blunders
that are only avoided with breadth of knowledge and maturity of judgement'
(ibid.).
17. In the field of education, too, the centralizing action of the Revolution
and the Empire continued and completed a tendency which had already begun
under the Monarchy. Beside the Concours General, which, set up in the eighteenth
centurY, extended onto a national scale the competition taking place in
each Jesuit college and consecrated the humanist ideal of belles-lettres, the
agregation, re-established by decree in 1808, was [ust organized in 1776, in a
form and with a significance very close to those it has today. If such facts and
more generally everYthing relating to the educational system's own historY are
almost always ignored, this is because they would belie the common representation
which, reducing university centralization to an aspect of bureaul.'Iatic centralization,
would have it that the French system owes its most significant characteristics
to Napoleonic centralization.
If one forgets all that the educational system owes to its essential function of
inculcation, one fails to recognize the specffically pedagugic foundations and
functions of standardization of the message and of the instruments of its transmission
(a pedagogic homogenization which is to be found in the administratively
most decentralized systems, such as, for example, the British system). More
subtly, one is prevented from grasping the specifically pedagogiC function and
effect of carefully cultivated distance from the university bu ucracy, which are
an integral part of all pedagogic practice, particularly of French-style traditional
pedagogy. Thus, for example, the flaunted, factitious liberties taken with the
official syllabuses, or the ostentatious disavowal of the administration and its
172 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
rules, and more generally all the tricks which consist in deriving charismatic
effects from contempt for the non-teaching staff,are authorized and favoured by
the institution only because they help to affirm and impose the pedagogic
authority required for the performance of inculcation, as well as giving teachers
an economical way of illustrating the cultivated relation to culture.
18. 'I remember I once said to the future General de Charry, when 1 gave him
back an exercise: "That's a script worthy of the agregation" , (R. Blanchard,Ie
decouvre l'Universite Paris,Fayard,1963, p. 135).
19. The concern to maintain and manifest the absolute autonomy of academic
hierarchies is expressed through innumerable indices, whether in the
tendency to attribute an absolute value to the marks awarded (with the use of
decimals, taken to absurd lengths) or in the constant tendency to compare marks,
averages, the best scripts and the worst,from one year to another. For example:
in the Rapport de l'agregarion de grammaire feminine for 1959, after a table of
the number of posts offered, the number of candidates eligible [to take the oral,
having passed the written examinationI and the number of candidates fInally
admitted, from 1955 to 1959 (in which it is seen that the number of successful
candidates is almost always only half as great as the number of posts available),
and the average marks, worked out to two decimal places, of the last eligible and
fIrst and last successful candidates,one reads (p. 3):
This year's vintage was not exactly uplifting (...) The 1959 competition did 

not fail to bring in some scripts savouring of knowledge or culture; but the 

figures themselves bespeak a falling-off which can only be regarded with alarm 

(...) The averages of the last eligible and last admitted have never been so low 

since 1955 (...). The lengthening of the lists (of candidates admitted),forced 

on us by the present unfortunate circumstances, appeared to us to be justified 

solely in terms of the recruiting crisis which mainland France is not alone in 

suffering ( ..).There is reason to fear that the inexorable law of supply and 

demand will bring about a decline in standards so grave as to jeopardize the 

very spirit of secondary education. 

Countless similar texts could be quoted, in which every word is laden with the
whole university ideology.
20. This 'national peculiarity' was highlighted by Durkheim: by the forms of
organization it imposed and the spirit it diffused,secondary education has from
the very beginning 'more or less absorbed the other levels of education and taken
up almost all the space' (Durkheim, L 'evolution pedagogique. I, pp. 23-24, 137,
and passim).
21. This analysis of the French system does not pretend to do more than
bring to light a particular structure of internal and external factors which is
173Exclusion and Selection
capable of explaining, in the particular case, the weight anel modalities of the
examination. Further research would have to show how, in other national
histories of the university system, different confIgurations of factors defIne
different tendencies or equilibriums.
22. Although academic performance and rate of sixieme entry are closely
dependent on social class, the overall ineqUality in sixieme entry rates derives more
from inequality of sixieme entry at equal levels of performance than from
inequality of academic performance (see P. Clerc, 'Nouvelles donnees sur I'orientation
scolaire au moment de ('entree en sixieme' (II), Population, Oct.-Dec.,
1964, p. 871). Similarly,statistics on the transition from one stage of education
to the next in relation to social origin and academic performance show that in the
US and Great Britain it is not, strictly speaking, the School that is responsible for
elimination (see R. J. Havighurst and B. L. Neugarten,Society and Education,
Boston,Allyn and Bacon,2nd edn, 1962,pp. 230-35).
23. See R. Ruiter, The Past and Future Inflow of Students into the Upper
Levels of Education in the Netherlands, OECD, DSA/EIP/63; J. Floud, 'Social
Class Factors in Educational Achievement', in Ability and .Educational Opportunity,
ed.A. H. Halsey, OECD, 1961; T. Husen,'Educational Structure and the
Development of Ability" ibid., table (p. 125) showing the percentage of nonapplicants
to pre-university school in Sweden,by school marks and social origin.
24. Docimology: the science of examinations (trans.).
25. In the terms used here, subjective expectation and objective probability
are contrasted as the standpoint of the agent and the standpoint of science, which
constructs objective regularities by means of methodical observation. By our
recourse to this sociological distinction (which has nothing in common with the
distinction some statisticians make between a priori and a posteriori probabilities).
we seek to indicate here that objective regularities are internalized in the
form of subjective expectations and that the latter are expressed in objective
behaviours which contribute towards the realization of objective probabilities.
Hence depending on the point of view adopted - that of explaining practices in,
terms of structures or that of forecasting the reproduction of structures in terms
of practices we are led to privilege in this dialectic either the first relation or the
second.
26. For an analysis of the process of internalization through which the
chances objectively contained in conditions of existence are transmuted into
subjective expectations or despondency, and,more generally,of the mechanisms
referred to above,see P. Bourdieu, 1966,2; 1974,1.
27. To be persuaded that this apparently abstract schema covers the most
concrete experiences, one can read in Elmstown 's Youth an educational biography
which shows how membership of a peer group can,to a certain extent at
least, falsify assessment of the chances linked to class membership (see A. E.
174 Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture
Hollingshead, Elmstown's Youth, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1949, pp.
169-71).
28. See M. de Saint-Martin, 1968,2: 1971,2.
29. In France in 1961-62,manual workers sons made up 20.3 percent of the
sixieme intake into the lycees (a term covering schools of very different
standards) and 38.5 percent of the intake of the Colleges d'Enseignement
Generale, whereas the sons of senior executives and members of the professions
(also strongly represented in private schools) made up 14.9 percent of the Iycee
intake and only 2.1 percent of the CEG intake (see Informations statistiques,
Paris, Ministere de I'Education Nationale, Jan. 1964). Elimination from both
Iycee and CEG before completion of the course accentuates the underrepresentation
of the working classes; furthermore, the difference of standard
between the two types of school is such that, for those who might wish to
continue their studies beyond the brevet [certificate of secondary technical
education I, access and adaptation to a classe de seconde [fifth form I in a Iycee,
an institution differing in its teaching staff, mentality and social intake, are both
unlikely and difficult to accomplish.
30. The specific influence of the subjective expectation linked to the objective
probability of success which is attached to a particular curriculum or type
of school can be seen in the 'demoralizing' effect of entering a devalorized
curriculum or type of school: it has been observed in Britain that children who
scored equally well at age 11 had better scores at age 15 if they went to grammar
schools, whatever their social origin, and worse if they went to secondary modem
schools (Robbins Report, Appendix I, Pt II, p. 50 - Great Britain: Committee on
Higher Education, Higher Education Report of the Committee Appointed by the
Prime Minister under the Chairmanship of Lord Robbins, 1961-63, London,
HMSO, 1963).
31. There have been many descriptions of how the diversification of its
institutions of higher education enables the American school system to 'cool out'
those who, failing to meet the standards of 'real schooling', are quietly directed
towards 'dumping grounds' which the institution and its agents are able to present
as leading to 'alternative achievements' (B. R. Oark, 'The "Cooling-Qut" Function
in Higher Education', in Education, Economy and Society, eds. J. Floud and
C. A. Anderson, New York, Free Press, 1961). In the same way, the French
University is tending more and more to use the implicit, interlocking hierarchies
which underpin the whole educational system to secure the 'progressive withdrawal'
of the students it relegates into channels for 'rejects'.
32. On the 'multivariate fallacy' see above, Chapter 1,p. 103,note 2.
33. A study of the social and educational characteristics of Concours General
prizewinners supplies an exemplary illustration of these analyses. See P. Bourdieu
and M. de Saint Martin, 1970,1.
175Exclusion and Selection
34. The 'wonderboy' (Ie miraculi!) - i.e. the working-<:Iass child who succeeds
'against all the odds'; cf., perhaps, in Britain, the 'scholarship boy'. For 'the
inheritor', cf. Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964,1,(trans.).
35. Clearly one should not credit the subjects with an absolute lucidity as to
the truth of their experience: their practices can be adjusted to their position in
the system without being directly governed by anything other than the reinterpretation,
offered by the system, of the objective conditions of their presence in the
system. Thus, while the educational attitudes of the 'miraculously' successful
working-<:lass pupil appear as objectively (but indirectly) governed by his objective
class chances, his conscious representations and his discourse may have as
their guiding principle the magical image of the permanent miracle, merited by an
effort of the will.
36. By way of a limiting case, the competitive examinations in medicine
starkly reveal features observed elsewhere - the primacy given to the function of
selection, conceived as class co-option; the role of rhetoric (not only verbal but
also gestural and, so to speak, postural); the artificial creation of castes irreversibly
separated by different educational backgrounds (see H. Jamous, Con·
tribution Ii une sociologie de Ia decision, Paris, CSE, 1967, pp. 86-103).
37. A host of examples could be cited to show how examiners transform the
most technical tests into an ethical ordeal: 'I see the examination, especially the
viva, as bearing on extremely complex qualities. When taste, probity and modesty
are appreciated all at once, what you have is one personality seeking to understand
another' (C. Bougle, 3rd Conference on Examinations, pp. 3244). 'A
competition such as ours is not merely a technical challenge; it is also a test of
morality, of intellectual probity' (Agregation de grammaire. masculine, 1957,p.
14). 'The text having been thoroughly understood and the translation prepared by
analysis, in order to transform it into Greek it is then necessary to bring into play
at once moral qualities and technical knowledge. The moral qualities, which may
include courage, enthusiasm and so on, are concentrated in the virtue of probity.
There are duties towards the text. One must submit oneself to it and not cheat'
(Agregation de grammaire masculine, 1963, p. 20-21). There is no end to the
repertoire of adjectives used to account for technical faults in the language of
moral depravity: 'smug complacency', 'dishonesty', 'culpable negligence',
'cowardliness', 'intellectual laziness', 'crafty prudence', 'unacceptable impudence',
'shameless nullity', etc.
38. Just as, failing to take account of the social characteristics of the examiners
and the examinees, the docimologists have never thought to test the
correlation between similar marking patterns and the sb'cial and academic
characteristics of the group of examiners, so too, because they have not seen that
the spontaneous docimology of teachers has its logic and its social functions, they
can only fall back on puzzled indignation at the cool response their rational
preaching gets from the teaching profession.