[…] one knows the world better as one knows oneself better, that scientific knowledge and the knowledge of oneself and of one’s own social unconscious advance head-to-head and that the first experience transformed in and by scientific practice transforms scientific practice and vice-versa.

Jacques Bouveresse³

Pierre Bourdieu gave his students at Lille […] not a dissertation subject to be worked on but a work of reflexivity to carry out: he asked each one of us to attempt a sociology of oneself […]. Such encouragement to make one’s own sociology, in the first person so to speak, more than following the sociology course, was not just the application of active pedagogy, it was the expression of an epistemological conviction: this is the price to render sociological knowledge possible

Marie-Anne Lescourret⁴

It is hard to affiliate the present text to a mere autobiographical essay after having read all of P. Bourdieu’s considerations and restrictions to the genre. Hard to leave aside roots of such nature when, in great part, the ways of thinking grounded on this author and thus a path to production for investments in research made in the educational area is structured. Hard not to consider one of his dearest principles, so often restated, of affirming the meaning of producing knowledge that unveils the unthought in our own convictions, ideas and actions. The transcription of the initial excerpts alludes to the motivations that shape the reflections presented here. I elaborate an essay that seeks to build a personal itinerary of appropriation of the sociologist’s work and in it structure a chronology of readings. In this itinerary I sought to place the comprehension movements of the educational field and sought their references for the building of interpretations about history, or, better said, about a socio-history of Brazilian education (^{CATANI, 2003}), about a hypothesis of comparative studies within the same area (^{CATANI, 2000}) and about alternatives for teachers’ training able to promote a culture of attention to the world and to its care (^{CATANI, 2010}). These three perspectives guided my research work. Here I will write only of the first and third perspectives, though comparative studies have also found supporting elements in Bourdieu. Thus I seek to bear witness to one of the appropriation modalities of Bourdieu thought and work in the educational area. It is impossible to return to all the readings undertaken and indeed I do not mention important aspects of the itinerary and of its detours, or other texts that have also been relevant to this trajectory. I am able to tell how the readings from Bourdieu’s work have interacted between themselves and with my own lived library (in Goulemot’s sense) in the several moments I refer to. I summon Goulemot (2009) because of the idea he enunciates, according to which every reading is comparative, as it involves contact with other books that compose our lived, physical and inner libraries. For the reasons mentioned, as well as for the nature of the proposition I make, this essay does not aspire to be complete and exhaustive or to amount to a demonstration. Surely there is, in my reflections, a way of dealing with the times lived by me, with the discoveries and confrontation of educational field issues and with the appropriations of P. Bourdieu’s elaborations that do not allow for a kind of revisiting or describing that fully respects chronological ordinations. I nevertheless rehearse a few landmarks. Times overlap, the perception of the issues gains successive outlines and the readings that offer strong explanatory support, in some cases, were not simultaneous to the research moments of the development of interventions, but in such cases they have guided, if later, their redefinitions. Comings and goings were necessary⁵.

The horizon towards which the questions I make tend regard the understanding of educational work and the production of knowledge about, for and within this activity. And it regards a strong conviction: the possibility conditions and the logical and disciplinary support of such knowledge in their social and historical dimensions are fundamental for all who teach in institutions and schools, and not only for those who produce them. It is never idle to insist on this, because I believe that it is possible to summon from the comprehension of our reality, from the knowledges involved in our jobs and in the modes of their production, the power to transform such knowledges aiming at greater justice and better life conditions for all who depend on the school. May this itinerary of readings allow us, as they show fulcral points in Bourdieu’s thought, read in search of a fairer interpretation in the dangerous times we live today, to remake questions that help us widen paths: what can schools do and what can teachers do today? What can we, who research, write and speak about such problems? Up to what point the potency of our thought will also be in danger?

**

*

1970 – In the city of São Paulo, in the extreme opposite of the University of São Paulo’s EACH campus, lies the peripheral East Side neighbourhood where I live, the two points being 28 kilometres apart. Why do I start saying this? In order to account for the physical distance that demanded a slow progress on two buses of uncertain schedule and long itineraries – the trips are long in order to have more people boarding, or instance, dwellers in the peripheries heading for the distant Hospital das Clínicas. And to allude to a social distance that I would come to understand better as years went by. The situation was very similar to the one described in Heirs: students and culture:

The experience of a schooling future cannot be the same for the son of a high executive who, having more than one chance in two of reaching university, necessarily finds high studies around his person and even within his family as a banal and quotidian fate, but, the son of a worker who, having less than two chances in a hundred to reach as far, only knows studies and students through interposed people or means. (^{BOURDIEU; PASSERON, 2014b}, p. 17).

This observation is dated of 1964 and refers to France. My own admission to the University of São Paulo (USP) took place in 1970, year when the Law no. 5,540, of 1968 (the so-called university reform) was passed, a law that theoretically widened access to higher education for students from the popular classes. I will not dwell on facts around the admission of this “new population” to university, although our teachers then spoke a lot about the “level gap” between older students and those freshly arrived. And, during the dictatorship period, as we well know, meritocracy and “education as social ascension” was widely advertised. It is worth sharing a very explanatory realisation of such conditions as I quote the Census worker in charge of, back in the 1970’s, the collection of information in several of my neighbourhood’s blocks (IBGE – Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística). He told me that there was no other person attending university in my area. The statement did not resonate a lot on me at the time and surely strengthened in me an illusion of merit and natural aptitude.

A more cunning understanding of the meanings involved in the university reform and in the position taken by me would become increasingly sharper. But the uneasiness in face of the very “at ease” performances of some of my classmates was something that alerted me about my own attitudes in such ambiance. This type of uneasiness lingers on one and takes up new forms in other social situations. Shyness, insecurity and feeling inadequate. I recall Didier Eribon’s book, Return to Reims (dated of 2009 and translated into Portuguese in 2020), which resorts to Bourdieu’s (who the author knew) interpretations and rehearses his socio-analysis. He thus builds, more than memories, something like a testimonial by an intellectual originating from the popular classes, who confronts his exit from his original group and who seeks to understand the extension of the social implications of his trajectory and lived experiences. Along the same lines, Annie Ernaux’s novel, The place [La Place] (originally published in 1982 and translated into Portuguese in Brazil in 2021), which revolves around the figure of the father and that elaborated the analysis of her relationship with him, reconstituted the perception of their progressive growing apart as her schooling advanced and the distance between the habits, the ideas and the aspirations of both acquired almost incomesurable dimensions. Even recognising the distinction between an analysis such as Eribon’s, who can be seen more supported by sociology, and Ernaux’s, which, to a great extent, renders indiscernible the limits between her auto-fictions and the sociological interpretation she produces, both books show the possibilities of elaborating an understanding of oneself that unveils the unthought in the social determinations of our existences⁶.

It is obvious that I benefit from A Self-Analysis Sketch by P. Bourdieu (2005b). I will try not to yield to the risk of simply producing many causalities a posteriori, but I do not believe I can handle what truly interests me – the appropriation of the sociologist’s work and his presence in my own researches and teaching – without referring to what has motivated me, induced or strengthened my interest in his writing. And such impulses have come, certainly, from my condition and life experience. I hold dear that I will be more successful if I do not make the “autobiographical mistakes” often highlighted by Bourdieu since, at least, The Biographical Illusion (written in 1986 and included in the Brazilian book Razões práticas, 1996b) – also rendered explicit in Réponses (1992) and certainly in Sketches of Self-Analysis, among others. I try not to engage in an exhaustive causality or a linear ordination in which the facts gain consistency as they are chained into an artificial sequence. Among the various definitions formulated by Bourdieu, I believe to be exemplary the one I have resorted to (^{CATANI, 1994}), from The Biographic Illusion:

[…] Trying to understand a life as a unique series, in itself sufficient in successive events, without another link than the one linking to a “subject” whose only constancy is one’s own name, is almost as absurd as trying to explain an itinerary in the metro without taking into account the network structure, i.e. the matrix of objective relations between the many stations […]. (^{BOURDIEU, 1996b}, p. 86).

It would be deceitful to say that it is possible to leave aside such personal dimensions and to try to isolate the options and production of my work from my deeper rooting, eliding such phenomenon as the ascension through education that, to a certain extent, has transformed me, in the course of time, into something like a trans-class case, with all the situations’ costs and benefits, to use an expressions such as expressed by Chantal ^{Jaquet (2014)}. I do not revisit the set of implications that this author expounds in order to account for the accommodation movements characteristic of the processes through which non-reproduction can be set up. Keep in mind that she intends to refer to a prolonging of the potential aspects of Bourdieu’s explanations. An eventual linearity of what I expound is a manner of rendering legible the mode of appropriating the author, and certainly it is dependent on the place occupied by me as a teacher at a renowned university, in courses much devalued in the hierarchy of academic legitimacies.

In the second half of the 1970’s, the Brazilian translation of La reproduction –éléments pour une theorie du système d’enseignement (BOURDIEU; PASSERON, 1970) was published. With the translation dated of 1975, readings of Bourdieu hit the education area. The reactions to the text are well known and we have already shown how they flashed amongst us (CATANI; CATANI; PEREIRA, 2001). The incomprehension that, in most cases, engendered an indisposition with the book, made it seem to some that the text was limited to only demonstrating that the school reproduced domination relations. This demonstration itself was no mean feat, because up to then it had not been demonstrated how, within schools, the dominant practices, values and demands operated in this direction. But some considered it insufficient for the expectations around the institution’s transformative power. The rich identification of the forms in which this reproduction was made concrete in school life in face of the multiplicity of teaching practices on the various levels was left aside. The attention to such aspects could have had the effect of favouring the search for the overcoming of reproductive practices, but part of the book’s potential was ignored. Regarding the resistance to Bourdieu that this attitude provoked, Maria Andréa Loyola, in a book (2002) edited by her that included an interview with Bourdieu, identified among her students a refusal drive towards reading and understanding the work. Perhaps reading Les héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (originally published in 1964) could have helped not to have restricted the interpretation, but the book circulated little amongst us and was translated only in 2014. For a long time the accusation of reproductivism prevailed, a kind of trap into which the book on reproduction seems to have fallen into, perhaps for not considering what it carried as potency in the identification of devices and processes through which social categories of appreciation in school categories were reconfigured, aggravating inequalities. It was not seen then that, as the mode through which this took concrete form in school life was rendered explicit, spaces for transformation were opened within institutions. As we sought to show how Bourdieu was read in Brazil’s educational area, we tried to recognise the nuances of the appropriation carried out and the consequences yielding whence for the resistance to reading in such moments, when the dictatorship’s pressure drove the search for quick solutions in the fight against the school’s limitations. Obviously not all the readings were carried out thus.

The appropriation undertook, at the moment of the Brazilian translation, directed my interest towards the functioning of life inside the school, its inculcation and valuation mechanisms of behaviour modes precisely regarding aspects that, from the beginning of my schooling trajectory, I had observed as distinctive among the children and the places they took up in the institution. From the point of view of self-understanding, I was led to reflect further about the relations that the many individuals develop with school life, what goes on there and the determining character that such relations gain in the failure or success possibilities and in the extension of schooling. Involved in issues of teaching and of teaching practices - by force the disciplines I taught – I turned towards the analyses of the routine forms of school life; the classes, the pedagogical discourses, the tests and examination and their contributions to the preservation of the established order and to the justifications grounded on merit and on natural gifts. And I believe that the transformations of school practices, even though within the narrow limits of the possibilities allowed for by the system, partially but decisively collaborates to attenuate the harm caused by school inequalities as transfigurations of social inequalities. I found in The reproduction (^{BOURDIEU; PASSERON, 2014a}) more fertile elements to think what is possible to collaborate for the training of teachers, precisely as Bourdieu examines the nature of the pedagogical relations as communication relations (and beyond), as well as carrying out the analysis of evaluation procedures in order to try to understand the constitution of judgement and classification forms operating in the schools’ daily life. A later reading of The Categories of Professorial Judgement (BOURDIEU; SAINT-MARTIN, published originally in 1975 and in Brazil in 1998) rendered this understanding a lot more precise.

In my reading of The Heirs I found an opening indicated by the authors, at the end of the text, regarding the need for and possibility of a rational pedagogy able to “[…] methodologically and continuously neutralise, from pre-school to the university, the action of social factors of cultural inequalities […] (^{BOURDIEU; PASSERON, 2014b}, p. 101). This pedagogy would be grounded on a sociology of cultural inequalities. In the proposition of new readings for the work, in the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication (1964 and 2014) I sought to indicate the reflections that could help in the reckoning of the relations with school work, carried out by students and teachers, on the many levels of teaching and of social strata that would thus allow for the elaboration of new modalities of more fertile practices (^{CATANI, 2015}). As I read on, my attention was directed to Bourdieu’s words about the low status, evident in university level education, of those who risked trying to teach the “how” of school life: study techniques, organisation of time, the discipline of intellectual work, group work, for instance. It seems certain to me that the domain of such relations with school culture should include, according to each level, the comprehension of the meanings and the power of each one of the learnings and activities. And that this last possibility is also feasible as an acquisition involving dialogue in the teaching of the various disciplines.

The text The Ideology of Natural Aptitudes by Nöelle ^{Bisseret, (1979)} strengthened the understandings potentiated by The Reproduction (^{BOURDIEU; PASSERON, 2014a}). In a historical perspective, the presence, uses and configurations of natural aptitude are examined in society as operated by the church, by the law and by psychology, furnishing important elements to understand, additionally, the derivation of psychology’s knowledges into education. We read, during those years, books by Maria Helena Patto and by Luiz Antonio Cunha, who had already operated fertile appropriations of Bourdieu’s thinking and who had built important interpretations for the understanding of the Brazilian educational system, from a point of view that considered the socio-historical dimensions and the problem of inequalities and their aggravation by the school’s actions. The explanations mounted and helped out in the observation of documents that bear witness to the organisation of the educational field, life in the schools and the pedagogical practices, in the first republican period. And they were fundamental for the questionings around education and its relation with the human sciences, specially psychology.

The second half of the 1980’s was a time for the elaboration of a Ph.D. thesis that, as with most theses developed in the human sciences area, had a beginning as ambitious as it was unfeasible. It sought to undertake a historical analysis of the propositions/prescriptions aimed at teaching teachers to teach, in books, educational periodicals, legislation and other materials. It involved a huge scope. As I moderated the initial impulse and sought delimitations in order to understand how the productions of teaching applied deductive schemes of knowledge transposition in the formulation of recommendations about how teachers should perform and to what kind of expectation this met, I walked a very long mile. I went on towards the analysis of teaching work (knowledges and practices) in Brazil’s first republican period and the configuration of the professionalisation of this category of agents (^{CATANI, 1989}). And it was with this study that I understood and described the processes of incipient organisation of what could be named the educational field. The delimitation of the thesis’ issues was driven by a question, simple in the way I formulated it, but which secured greater scope for what it unveiled regarding the organisation of the educators’ professional space. In the first republican phase, as the reforms were being carried out, the organisation of schools and of the bureaucratic instances needed for its maintenance, as actions following decisions by educators close to state power, what actually did the common teachers do in their schools? The history of education had been concentrating on the examination of “great events and their promoters”. One question was lacking: what did, say and could do the teachers in theirs schools and in the public space? The thesis tried to find an answer for that.

Readings beyond The Reproduction (^{BOURDIEU; PASSERON, 2014a}) were decisive for the pruning of the thesis’ core. For instance, it is from Issues in Sociology (originally published in 1980 and in Brazil in 1983) that the understanding of how the concept of “field” could gain an operative role for the understanding of the socio-historical dimensions of the organisation of the educators’ professional space. In Issues in Sociology, the brief text Some properties of fields strengthened the perspective from which one could interpret the history of Brazilian education learning about the multiple dimensions of the school system, of its agents, teaching work and and relations between teachers and the State, beyond the physical space of the production and circulation of knowledge, among them these which such professionals elaborated and published in their young press constituted by magazines and other printed matter. The perspective allowed for the simultaneous consideration of various instances and defined the space by means of the disputes that, from the beginning, were evident and implicated in the struggle for places, positions and rights, and the specific capitals whose possession would authorise the elaboration and imposition of paths for education. Many other texts by the sociologist were important in this direction, both those referring to the scientific field and the artistic/literary fields, beyond what was called the schooling field.

A collection of P. Bourdieu’s texts, organised by Sérgio Miceli and greatly responsible for the initial diffusion of his thought in Brazil, The Economy of Symbolic Exchanges (2005a), contributed to the choices and interpretations that were built later. In the text about excellence and the values of the French teaching system, I found formulations that helped me to reflect more on the modes of organising the teaching practices that I was developing. I found elements to understand the construction of the categories and judgements of school evaluations, from the point of view of teachers, such as their exercising a small power of whose foundations they are not always aware and, from the point of view of students, this power most of time works as a proclamation of fate. He underlines: […] as with every social perception, the judgements that teachers make regarding students, chiefly in examination situations, take into account not only the knowledge and the know-how, but also the imponderable nuances of manner and style […]” referring to the unconscious principles of social definition of school excellence (^{BOURDIEU, 2005a,} p. 232, italicized in the original). The issue would return in many other analyses and would gain an even greater explanation in The Categories of Professorial Judgement (^{BOURDIEU; SAINT-MARTIN, 1998}), originally published in France in 1975. An investigation hypothesis was increasingly formed regarding the transformations experienced by the teachers from the second half of the nineteenth century, as articulators of the social recognition of their role. Institutionalised training, production of specialised knowledge and attempts to organise a category into associations marked this moment and characterised the first republican period. It was necessary to counter the very characteristics of the historical-educational texts that, to a great extent, still reiterated traditional interpretations with their attention to great ideas, names and reforms, and understood being necessary to think the space of education from the landmarks of political history, besides privileging sources also traditional, such as legislation, official speeches and the such. In this sense, the decade of 1990 brought about amongst us significant transformations in the production of the history of education: the proliferation of studies was characterised by authors increasingly resorting to previously little used sources, by the fresh questions addressed to the materials already valued and by a consideration of the relative autonomy of the educational field, which propitiated the adoption of new periodisations.