Educational capital can be utilized to produce or reproduce inequality, and it can also serve as a leveling mechanism that fosters social justice and equal opportunity.
[1] Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein explore how the cultural capital of the dominant classes has been viewed throughout history as the "most legitimate knowledge.
Through its value-inculcating and value-imposing operations, the school also helps (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the initial disposition, i.e., class of origin) to form a general, transposable disposition towards legitimate culture, which is first acquired with respect to scholastically recognized knowledge and practices but tends to be applied beyond the bounds of the curriculum, taking the form of a 'disinterested' propensity to accumulate experience and knowledge which may not be directly profitable in the academic market(23).
In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Appadurai suggests “...commodities represent very complex social forms and distributions of knowledge.”(41)[5] In her article "Gifting the Children: Ritual Economy of a Community School,"[6] Rhoda Halperin explores the practices of an urban community school through a ritual economy perspective.
McAnany and Wells define ritual economy as "the process of provisioning and consuming that materializes and substantiates worldview for managing meaning and shaping interpretation.
"[6] The primary entity that is produced, acquired, and consumed is the public community charter school (a nonprofit corporation) that consists of a building and a collection of educational practices and programs.
Gifting the children entails a "complex set of morally driven (and ritualized) informal, intergenerational economic practices: modeling survival strategies by combining work in the formal wage economy with informal work on odd jobs...providing actual resources such as food, sometimes housing, clothing and school supplies.
[6] The literature in anthropology suggests that local knowledge [14][15] can play a pivotal role in the success of schools by sustaining community participation in education.
In Gramsci's view, intellect is not based solely on academic knowledge, “...the mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence…but in active participation in practical life, as a constructor, organizer, 'permanent persuader' and not just a simple oratore…”(10).
[18] American anthropologist Clifford Geertz[14] also posits the importance of the local knowledge and common sense of people involved in everyday life: To us, science, art, ideology, law, religion, technology, mathematics, even nowadays ethics and epistemology, seem genuine enough genres of cultural expression to lead us to ask (and ask, and ask) to what degree other peoples possess them, and to the degree that they do possess them what from do they take, and given the form they take what light has that to shed on our own version of them.”(92)[14]The preceding literature suggests that school orientations and professional development led by community leaders and residents that instruct teachers about community heritage might lead to a more successful educational experience and outcomes for children and the community.
Makagon and Neuman [21] suggest that the narrative realm can be enlarged through citizen storytellers who “…can be anyone who wants to create a documentary about historical or contemporary life…the concept is based in the idea of democratizing the means of representing interests, issues, experiences, and the concerns of people who do not have access to media but have stories they want to tell”(55).
A growing sentiment among conservative politicians and some businesses is that the purpose of public education is to provide the private sector with individuals who are trained to perform whatever job required.
To this end, an emphasis on job or career specific training has begun to permeate the rhetoric with respect to educational policy.
Some of these schools are funded by specific businesses, corporations, or individual benefactors that espouse particular ideals or goals for the education of children and youth.