Forbes – James Marshall Crotty
“Nearly four years and 215 posts since I launched this column, I’ve concluded that everything I have written on education – from tutoring to for-profits to MOOCs to collegiate rankings to academic fraud to alternate certification to even corporal punishment in schools – boils down to two themes: cultural capital and skills. The former, which will be the subject of my next book, deals with that accumulation of intuited knowings and behaviors that mark an educated person. These are not skills or attributes that one necessarily picks up in the classroom. Rather, they are largely learned by osmosis in one’s home, community and among one’s peers. As a previous posts of mine entitled “Education Is The Answer To Income Inequality: Part Two” noted, cultural capital can be broken down into – though is not limited to – several components: A. The size and range of vocabulary in one’s environment; B. The emphasis placed on learning by family and peers; C. The quantity and depth of rigorous reading material (including learned journals of opinion, news magazines, non-tabloid newspapers, classic works of fiction and nonfiction) to which one is exposed; D. The depth and sophistication of conversations in the home, around the dinner table, in after-school programs, and amongst one’s peers.”(more)