There is a persistent story that education systems tell about themselves: that they are meritocratic. That talent, effort, and intelligence are what determine outcomes. That the playing field, if not perfectly level, is at least aspiring toward levelness. That a good enough student from any background can succeed.

This story is not supported by the evidence.

The relationship between socioeconomic background and educational outcomes is one of the most replicated findings in social science. PISA data from Germany consistently show one of the steepest socioeconomic gradients in the OECD — the correlation between parental education and student performance is higher here than in most comparable countries. This is not a recent finding. It has been stable for decades. The system produces it reliably, which means the system is, in some meaningful sense, designed to produce it — even if no individual actor intended that design.

Understanding why requires a different vocabulary than the one most educational institutions use about themselves.

Bourdieu’s Three Capitals

Pierre Bourdieu spent much of his career developing an account of how social inequality reproduces itself through culture and education. The core concept is capital — but not only the economic kind.

Bourdieu (1986) distinguishes three forms:

Economic capital is material resources: money, assets, time purchased through money. This is the most visible form of advantage. Wealthier families can pay for tutoring, for better-resourced schools, for the unpaid internships that build CVs, for the years of postgraduate study that increasingly function as the entrance requirement for professional careers.

Cultural capital is more subtle. It includes dispositions, skills, and knowledge that are valued by educational institutions and professional fields — but valued in a way that tends to favour those who acquired them at home, in childhood, before formal education began. The ease with which a student navigates a seminar. The familiarity with the tacit conventions of academic writing. The sense that the university is, broadly, a place made for people like you. These are not things that are explicitly taught; they are things that are transmitted, Bourdieu argues, through families whose own cultural capital aligns with what the institution expects.

Social capital is networks: the web of relationships that provide information, referrals, opportunities, and vouching. Who you know, in the flattest possible terms.

All three reinforce each other. Economic capital can be converted into cultural capital through education and into social capital through exclusive networks. Cultural capital eases access to prestigious institutions, which build social capital. The system is not static, but it has a strong gravitational pull toward reproduction.

Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) developed this into a theory of education as reproduction: the function of educational institutions is not primarily to transmit knowledge but to legitimate the transmission of social position from one generation to the next. The process is misrecognised — by students, teachers, and institutions — as meritocracy. This misrecognition is essential to the function. If it were transparent, it would lose its legitimising power.

The Hidden Curriculum

Philip Jackson (1968) coined the term hidden curriculum for everything that schools teach that is not in the official syllabus. How to sit still. How to wait your turn. How to speak to authority. How to navigate institutions, read implicit expectations, manage bureaucracies. How to understand that your job is to demonstrate competence within a form that someone else has set.

For students whose home culture aligns with the institutional culture, the hidden curriculum is invisible. They already know it; it requires no effort; it is simply how things are. For students whose home culture diverges, it is a second curriculum that must be decoded while simultaneously managing the official one.

Lareau (2003) documented this in careful ethnographic detail. Middle-class families engage in what she calls concerted cultivation — a mode of child-rearing that practises precisely the dispositions valued by educational institutions: articulate self-advocacy with adults, a sense of entitlement to ask questions and seek explanations, activities structured around developing discrete skills. Working-class and poor families, in her study, more often practised accomplishment of natural growth — providing security, affection, and freedom without the institutional structuring. Neither is better parenting. But one of them is what the school expects.

The child who arrives at school already knowing how to talk to teachers, how to present themselves, how to advocate for their own needs, has a significant advantage that is invisible in the transcript. It does not appear as “privilege”; it appears as “ability” or “maturity”. The institutional category does the misrecognising work.

Privilege as Invisible to Those Who Have It

Peggy McIntosh (1989) wrote what became one of the most cited — and most contested — essays in education: “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. Her core observation is structural: privilege is the absence of disadvantage, and absences are invisible to those who live inside them. You do not notice the ease with which you move through a system that was designed for people like you, any more than you notice breathing.

This is not an accusation. It is a description of a structural feature with consequences for self-understanding.

My background is in physics; I now work in universities, having grown up in a household with books and educated parents and the background assumption that higher education was something that people like us did. I was not aware of most of this as an advantage while it was happening, because it did not feel like an advantage — it felt like normal. The awareness came later, with effort, and it remains incomplete.

The invisible entrance fee is what you have already paid, in cultural capital, before you walk through the door. The institution does not ask about it explicitly. It simply rewards those who have it and attributes the reward to merit.

What This Means for Accessibility

The previous post in this series argued that full accessibility — Barrierefreiheit — is structurally impossible in a society organised as ours is; that the honest goal is Barrierearmut, the ongoing reduction of barriers. The connection to privilege is direct.

Barriers to education are not only physical. They include the cultural distance between the home environment and the institutional culture. They include not knowing that office hours exist and are meant for you, not just for students with problems. They include the inability to identify as “the kind of person who does a PhD” because you have never met anyone who did one. They include the exhaustion of navigating a system that requires you to translate yourself at every step, while your better-resourced peers spend that cognitive energy on the actual work.

None of these barriers appear on an accessibility audit. They are not visible from inside the institution looking out. They require actively listening to people whose experience differs from the institutional default, and then being willing to revise the default rather than add an exception.

The PISA gradient in Germany is a measurement of accumulated, unreduced barriers. It is not a measurement of the distribution of talent or effort. The system is producing the outcome; the students are receiving the label.

The Meritocracy Problem

Meritocracy is an appealing concept and a damaging ideology when taken seriously. The appeal: rewards should go to those who earn them, and earning should depend on effort and ability rather than inherited position. This is genuinely better than aristocracy.

The problem: in a society with steep inequality in the distribution of cultural, economic, and social capital, “merit” is not a neutral measurement. It is a measurement of the match between a person’s accumulated resources and the demands of the institution. Calling that match “merit” names the outcome without naming the process that produced it.

Michael Young, who invented the word “meritocracy” in 1958, intended it as a satire. His book The Rise of the Meritocracy depicted a dystopia in which the illusion of fairness made inequality more entrenched, not less, because it stripped the legitimacy from those who were left behind. If outcomes are fair, then failure is your fault. The ideology provides the institutional absolution; the individuals bear the moral weight of structural disadvantage.

This is precisely the dynamic that Bourdieu’s theory of misrecognition describes. The student from a poorly resourced background who does not reach the outcomes of their better-resourced peer is seen — by themselves, by teachers, by the institution — as less talented or less motivated, rather than as navigating a steeper gradient with fewer tools.

What Institutions Can Actually Do

The structural critique is not an argument for fatalism. Institutions can do things that matter.

They can make the hidden curriculum visible — explicitly teaching what is usually assumed. That means orientation programmes that actually explain institutional culture, not just procedures. It means academic writing support that is not remedial but normative. It means mentoring that connects first-generation students with people who understand the landscape.

They can audit their practices for whose default they assume. The timed closed-book exam was designed for a particular set of conditions; asking what it actually measures, and whether there are better instruments, is not lowering standards — it is interrogating what the standard is measuring.

They can diversify their faculty and staff, not as a cosmetic gesture but as a structural change in whose tacit knowledge is embedded in the institution. If the people who design the curriculum all navigated it from the same starting position, the curriculum will encode that starting position as normal.

They can name the entrance fee. Acknowledging that outcomes correlate with background, that this is a systemic feature and not a distribution of merit, is the first step toward taking institutional responsibility for the gradient rather than attributing it to the students.

None of this resolves the structural problem. The structural problem requires political change at scales well beyond any individual institution. But institutions are not passive. They can reduce the barriers they control, while being honest about the ones they do not.

A Personal Note

I sit in institutional positions that this analysis would identify as advantaged. I teach in a university. I benefited from the gradient in ways I cannot fully account for. The point of naming this is not guilt; it is responsibility. Being advantaged by a system you did not design does not make you complicit in its worst outcomes — but it does make you responsible for using whatever institutional leverage you have to make the system less exclusive.

The connection to accessibility is this: both inaccessibility and privilege are about whose defaults are built into the system and who is required to adapt to defaults they did not set. Reducing barriers and interrogating privilege are the same project, approached from different angles.

Neither is completable. Both are necessary.

References

  • Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J.G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood Press.
  • Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J.C. (1977). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Sage. (Original French edition 1970.)
  • Jackson, P.W. (1968). Life in Classrooms. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
  • Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. University of California Press.
  • McIntosh, P. (1989). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Peace and Freedom, July/August, 10–12.
  • OECD (2023). PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): The State of Learning and Equity in Education. OECD Publishing.
  • Young, M. (1958). The Rise of the Meritocracy. Thames and Hudson.