Educating Children in Times of Globalisation: Class-specific Child-rearing Practices and the Acquisition of Transnational Cultural Capital

Abstract

Owing to globalisation processes, foreign language skills and familiarity with foreign cultures and institutions, along with similar skills and dispositions which we call ‘transnational cultural capital’, have gained in importance, affecting the positional competition between classes. Drawing on Bourdieu and based on semi-structured interviews with parents of adolescents, some of whom spent a school year abroad, we reconstruct class-specific differences in the acquisition of transnational cultural capital via a school year abroad. We show how, for upper middle class families, this acquisition is embedded in specific child-rearing practices and facilitated by their endowment with different forms of capital. For the same reasons, lower middle class families tend to find the acquisition of transnational cultural capital much more difficult. However, we also identify ways and conditions under which these families can enable their children to embark on a school year abroad.