Explain What Is Meant by Cultural Deprivation and How It May Affect Achievement?

One of the major causes of underachievement is the lack of economic capital, proposed by Pierre Bourdieu (1984), that a working class family possess. As item A states, ‘sociologists claim that factors outside the school, such as parental attitudes and parental income, are the main causes of working class underachievement.’ Children who belong to a working class background may not be able to afford the necessary equipment or meet the

Social class is a large faction of people who have similar positions in an economic system. In an exemplary world, all students would have an equal shot at success, excellent schools, and educators that dedicate themselves and their time to achieving this goal. However, social class can significantly affect a student's success, highlighting the correlation between low socioeconomic statuses and academic problems. In all social groups, class plays a significant role in the attainment of children in education. Unfortunately, this has always been the case and the effects are just more evident today. Families from high social classes are more likely to obtain a greater level of education than those in low social classes. Members of upper social classes tend to be better educated and have higher incomes; therefore, they are better able to supply educational advantages to their children as well. Being in a financially disadvantaged can also affect a child’s performance during school.  It is important, therefore, to examine the way in which education is distributed through social class. Between societal pressures, expectations and parental negligence, children can be negatively impacted in their pursuit for future success through their education as exemplified through “College Pressures” and “The Sanctuary of School”.

In the study Lareau conducted, it can be see that working class and poor families differ slightly in that being poor means less resources and a means of a greater struggle for the child. The similarities found explain why being lower class has it benefits in some areas then if you were middle or upper class. Now Lareau is not telling people to raise their children one way or that being rich is better because even the rich have many disadvantages their children encounter. Lareau emphasizes, “Overall, daily life for working-class and poor children is slower paced, less pressured, and less structured than for their middle- and

The idea that working-class children will most likely under-achieve due to a lack of culture, also known as cultural deprivation, refers to children lacking the norms, values, beliefs, skills and knowledge that a society would regard as important and necessary. The attributes that these children should know and learn are, in most cases, taught by their parents and are passed to the next generation through socialisation. All children are socialised differently, and the social class of the parent has a huge impact on the child and may affect their achievement in education. According to the cultural deprivation theory, some working-class

According to Bynner and Joshi (1999) class differences have persisted since the late 1950’s. It can be seen that all studies carried out by various theorist came to the same conclusion that middle class pupils tend to do a lot better than working class in terms of educational achievement. Pupils from middle class backgrounds tend to pass more exams, stay on at school for longer and are five times more likely to go to university. This gap in achievement widens with age as right from nursery school to university, processes like labelling or the self fulfilling prophecy take

“Environmental influence during the first few years of life is crucial to all later abilities, especially intellectual ones”(Lightfoot et al., 2013, p.437). In the United States many children don’t receive an excellent education due to living in neighborhoods that are economically poor, typically where many minority children grow up. Children usually learn through social enhancement, imitation and explicit instruction that are provided in their culture from their families. The children who come from low-income backgrounds are found to do poorly in subjects, as well as standardize testing. Some thoughts are whether standardized testing discriminates against ethnic minority students and students from low income backgrounds, which usually rank below from other students in other socioeconomic status.

For example, the home of a pupil is a primary agent in their socialisation and education and this therefore has the biggest impact on the pupil so when at school they will either be handicapped or at an advantage from their upbringing. For example, Modood argued that some ethnic minorities have higher levels of cultural capital, despite often being from a working-class background. Many Indians and Asians originate from working-class backgrounds even though they end up with middle class jobs. These parents therefore place particularly high values on educational success and contain the knowledge and understanding of education to motivate their children and help them to succeed.

Many cultural groups are entitled to maintain their traditional attitudes, values, and especially languages; the lack of educational achievement and improvement is sometimes caused by the problem of a different

In Gillian Evans’ book of ‘Educational Failure and Working Class White Children in Britain,’ she mainly draws attention between the link of social class and education. Children, who have been brought up in a working class background, do not really have much of a head start in education in comparison to children who come from middle/upper-class backgrounds (Evans, 2006). Educational and economic status of parents plays an essential role on the road to success for their children. What’s more, her chapter proposes that children from working class backgrounds are innate to possess a low level of intelligence, but it can still be argued that a minority of children who come from working class backgrounds do tend to get great results (Evans, 2006). The author has illustrated an outlook on the social structure of intelligence and the way in which a child’s and parents relationship can have an impact on their level of understanding (Evans, 2006). It is commonly known that children tend to always pick things up and the learning process is

In the article “Culture of Success”, Brink Lindsey is quite equivocal; first Lindsey claims that low income is affecting education, but based on the surveys and research conducted he invalidates, his claims. Apart from low income, the main reason which Lindsey considers is lack of parental education, working for long hours to support the family and because of this they, do not involve more in their child's life, and do not give the motivation to develop

There are huge class differences within the tripartite system. This consists of grammar schools for academically able pupils, technical schools, and secondary modern schools. Two- thirds of grammar school places are taken by middle-class pupils, and working-class pupils mainly attend secondary moderns. This suggests that being in a higher class gives the pupils more opportunities being at a grammar school, and suggests that they have higher academic abilities. Grammar schools have more facilities and will offer far more opportunities for the pupils, and as the pupils are from a higher class they will be able to afford any extra curricular activities or trips. Secondary moderns may not offer these things or may not have the same facilities so there is a big inequality. This is where material deprivation comes into place and families in the working class will suffer. If families are unable to afford uniforms, trips, transport to and from school, classroom materials and textbooks, it can lead children to be isolated and bullied, meaning their school work suffers. Marketization of schools means that there will be better resourced, oversubscribed schools in more affluent areas, while socially disadvantaged children are concentrated in a limited number of

Schools also have a hidden curriculum in which values and norms of behaviour are transmitted. For example, wearing a school uniform and keeping to a set timetable can all be seen as activities that encourage particular standards of behaviour which could be viewed as producing disciplined future workers. Therefore the hidden curriculum implies that pupils not only learn formal subjects such as English or physics but also receive hidden messages about their class, ethnicity and gender from their experience of schooling. Through the choice of teaching strategies and characteristics chosen to be employed by educational institutions it indirectly conveys to students the norms, values and expectations. This is what we refer to as the hidden curriculum. As we will later explore there are many that argue the hidden curriculum and processes within schools help to produce inequalities between children of different social classes. Whitty and Young (1976) view the

Everyone knows about the various stereotypes and social stigmas that come with socioeconomic status whether they will choose to admit it or not. Society has come to assume that a child who comes from a family of low socioeconomic status, that they will not do as well as a child who comes from a family of a greater socioeconomic status. Unfortunately these assumptions are so ingrained in our brains that we start to follow the self-fulfilling prophecy. When a child from a noticeably low socioeconomic status walks into a classroom, it is not uncommon for the teacher to automatically assume that the child will not perform well in class, and in turn either grades the child more harshly or does not give the child as much attention as the

In this qualitative study Bourdieu’s theoretical framework of social reproduction as it relates to social and cultural capital and the concepts of field and habitus, demonstrate issues related to academic language literacy among EL students in the public school English/language arts classroom setting. There is a cultural disconnect for students not of the dominant culture, therefore they “feel they must learn the codes of power or intentionally underachieve in order to maintain cultural integrity” (Howard, 2010). There has been much research regarding deficit thinking and the notion that particular groups of people performed academically lower than other groups due to lacking language development (Valencia & Black, 2002). In the 21st century of education, cultural deficit theory is prevalent in public schools across the state and country. Cultural deficit theory is defined as having eurocentric beliefs, ways of being, communicating (Howard, 2010, p.29), While Valencia (1997) further explain deficit thinking as EL families have internal deficits that contribute to why EL students are underperforming academically to

Social disadvantage is hard to summarise in one single definition as there are a number of ways to measure it such as level of employment to health and life expectancy. However it is still problematic to solely conclude the existence of social disadvantage from measures such as these as Clegg and Ginsberg (2006:10) note how a family could have a good occupation and economic state, but If they reside in a poor neighbourhood it could have an effect on development. Due to the difficulty defining social disadvantage researchers have tried to distinguish between poverty status and SES (socio-economic status). Within this guideline three measures to determine it are taken into account: Occupation (often paternal), level of parental education (often maternal) and economic deprivation. The level of SES is therefore a useful way to determine the degree of social disadvantage, with low-SES being a useful way to define it. With this definition there has been an increasing level of focus on the issue of children from low-SES backgrounds displaying limited success academically than that of children from more socially advantaged backgrounds. In relation to language, this academic underachievement has been attributed to language skills inadequate for accessing the curriculum (Clegg