Summary Of Pracing At Home

In Seiter’s article, Practicing at Home: Computers, Pianos, and Cultural Capital, she uses Pierre Bourdieu’s framework as a way to understand economic, cultural and social capital to examine the issue of technology in secondary education. Seiter describes this form of capital as a reliance on public technology such as computers instead of having ready access to one in the private sphere. The technologies that are so prominent in modern times were initially introduced at a time where there was a large gap in between social classes and this new technology widened that gap. Lower income individuals and their children could not afford to purchase computers etc. and therefore were falling behind with the changing times. Education is now heavily based on technology and those children and schools that cannot afford
Bourdieu “stressed that the means of acquisition of cultural capital can be as important as what is acquired, thus stressing the way that learning in all forms is tightly intertwined with the social circumstances in which it takes place, and the value of various knowledges, as accorded within and between specific social divisions.”(33) Children who come from a family that is more “cultured” have a higher advantage because of their access to elite education and a development of skills that help them later on in the economic world. Embodied cultural capital, as described by Bourdieu, is when the body becomes accustomed to doing something after practice and is no longer conscious of it. In relation to technology and education, young children that are exposed to technology become automatically able to use those technologies because of their early exposure. Therefore, “acquisition of cultural capital are significant and have lasting effects” (Seiter 36) and “a lack of economic capital reinforces the lack of higher status cultural capital.” (Seiter