Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine (with a dramatic impact on energy and food prices), and extreme weather events in many parts of the world have accelerated social inequalities. This has contributed to widening educational inequalities, and the role of educational institutions in counteracting crises has become an ever more pressing question. In addition, an expansion and diversification of educational pathways has led to exclusionary mechanisms becoming more subtle. Educational opportunities have increased, but questions of who profits from this expansion, who is equipped to successfully navigate them and who is left behind arise. In this context, combating educational inequalities has become more complex and the intersectional interplay of various social relations (e.g. class, gender, race, and disability) creates new forms of both disadvantage and privilege. Therefore, to initiate meaningful change, it is crucial to understand the ambivalent role of the education system in creating opportunities and perpetuating inequalities.

More than 50 years ago, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron uncovered that educational practices and structures play a substantial role in perpetuating social hierarchies. Their studies demonstrated that while education is often seen as a tool for emancipation and progress, it also acts as an accomplice in reproducing inequalities. However, the ways in which educational institutions perpetuate unequal relations must be continually re-examined, locally contextualised and empirically explored in order to successfully tackle them. Bourdieu’s work remains highly relevant today for understanding how education generates and transforms opportunities as well as inequalities. His relational perspective allows us to examine the contemporary challenges posed by the polarisation of opportunities, the expansion of educational pathways, the marketisation of education under neoliberal developments and the increasing diversity of both learners and educators.

Bildungssprache as a concealment strategy for distinguishing a middle-class institution? (Abstract of Hawlik’s paper)

The Austrian education system is characterised by the tension between the German-speaking monolingualism of the public school system and the multilingualism of the student body. In Vienna, sixty per cent of children starting school do not speak only German. Nevertheless, the school has the latent function to organise the cult of a culture that can only be offered to all because it is in fact reserved for the members of the classes whose culture it has always been. Accordingly, in recent years Austrian schools have introduced various measures for learning German, including, since 2018, separate classes for learning German. This newer variant of German teaching ties in with “doing nation” and (re)produces nation-state linguistic and social orders that have been built up. Even in curricula for these separate classes, there is talk of pupils who must learn the so-called Bildungssprache early on. Bildungssprache refers to an elaborate linguistic code of language that is not precisely described in textbooks, curricula or language proficiency assessments, but which plays a crucial role in school-based selection. This theoretical, non-empirical analysis offers relational thinking in the study of educational inequalities. It examines with Bourdieusian analytical tools how the elimination of educational inequality seems to degenerate into a question of the right use of language and how the cultural inequality of children from different social classes is ignored.