Teoria social de Pierre Bourdieu e a democratização da educação

Abstract

The objective of the article is to understand how Bourdieu’s theory challenges the idea that education is a means of change and social equality. In this sense, the problem to be analyzed is how Bourdieu’s theory demonstrates that education reproduces social inequalities. For the author, school represents a space for legitimizing dominant culture. In this sense, this incorporation of dominant culture is not presented as such, but is constructed through masking of a neutral culture that falls to the pedagogical role legitimized by a competent authority that transmits knowledge and does not reinforce social inequalities. The article first seeks to present the author’s theoretical framework so that we can understand his approach and in the second moment we analyze how his theoretical approach makes it possible to analyze mechanisms to understand how social inequalities are produced in the context of public policies for higher education in Brazil.