Citizenship (and) Inequality: Ethnographic Research on Education and the Making and Remaking of Class Power and Privilege

This chapter is based on a meta-ethnographic investigation. Its main theme is that the processes of selection that operate in schools and education systems in Western countries, taking Sweden as an example, are claimed to be just and meritocratic but are instead fundamentally unjust and ineffective systems that reproduce rather than challenge existing structural inequalities. Socio-economic restrictions and the reproduction of upper-class cultural capital and ideology as official school knowledge play key roles, but it is also concluded that education and social equality, justice, and fair citizenship possibilities for all in capitalist societies have never stretched further than wringing out minor concessions from class society whilst leaving the reproduction and absolution of the class system and inequalities based on class and distinctions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and physical and mental differences intact.