Abstract

LIMA, Rita de Cássia Pereira  and  CAMPOS, Pedro Humberto Faria. Social classes, field, groups: contributions to thinking about the school's social role. ETD [online]. 2015, vol.17, n.3, pp.633-652. ISSN 1676-2592.  https://doi.org/10.20396/etd.v17i3.8638223.

To approach the social relations occurring in the school, this article proposes widening the economic perspective on the concept of "social classes", privileging the richness of social interactions occurring in school's everyday life, due mainly to the intensity of symbolic exchanges in this environment. As a reference, we adopted the Bourdieusian concept of "field", in which various forms of capital (economic, cultural, social, and symbolic) circulate, engendering material and symbolic struggles. The text starts with conceptions of the "social role of school" according to various authors (Dewey, Durkheim, Parsons, Pistrak) until the French context of the 1970's, in which Bourdieu affirms the idea of schools as entities that reproduce the society of classes, therefore, a place of class struggles. This discussion allows reflecting about inclusion/exclusion in the school and pointing to exclusion as a "societarian paradigm" in which there are social divisions with dominant and dominated elements, both economically and symbolically. In pursuit of a way to understand the social role of school beyond the economic dimension of classes, and taking into account the inclusion-exclusion relationship, we emphasize a symbolic perspective to the school environment founded on the notion of "field", with attention to "groups". We affirm the necessity of seeking a theoretical framework that can better explain the social relations between various agents/groups, social context, and school culture. By way of conclusion, we point to the fruitfulness of approximating Bourdieu's sociology to the psychosocial perspective of Moscovici's theory of social representations in order to explain the material and symbolic relations occurring in the school.

Keywords : School; Social Class; Groups; Pierre Bourdieu; Symbolic Exchanges.

        · abstract in Portuguese | Spanish     · text in Portuguese     · Portuguese ( pdf )