Cultural capital and within-class distinction: Private school preferences as cultural capital investment of middle classes

Education can be defined as the process of accumulating knowledge throughout the lives of individuals. In the process, there are a lot of intermediary institutions that provide the individual with the information they need to improve their attitudes and behaviors. Family, school, occupation, mass media are among these intermediary institutions. In this context, education include family education, school education, vocational education. This study deals with school education. School education is a source of cultural capital that needs to be invested in order to preserve or improve social positioning. Parents also give importance to school education in order to increase the social status of their children and they are worry about choosing "good school" for their children. Our study, which aims to show the role of school choices in shaping the position of children of families in social space, focuses on families' private school choices. This study argues approaches to the conceptual toolbox that middle-class families, who are considered to be advantageous in the field of education, see private schools as a cultural capital investment in order to improve or protect their children's position in the social space. It is based on the practical theory of Pierre Bourdieu and adds the approaches of habitus, capital, field and social space to the conceptual toolbox that he developed to understand individual activities. In this study, which was the product of a qualitative research, interviews were conducted with a total of 30 parents who sent their children to private schools in İzmir using semi-structured interview technique. In this context, cultural capital forms were themed and analyzed, and private schools were transformed into a means of discrimination that allowed individuals with similar lifestyles to be kept together. In conclusion, this study reveals that private school selection practice is a strategy that middle-class families carry out to differentiate their children from the general. Keywords: Education, Neoliberalism, Private School, Cultural Capital, Social Space