We invite you to the first School Field Seminar this academic year. As the central theme of the evening, this time we will focus on one of the most resounding contemporary social science works, Piketty’s Capital, and the question of the role of education in ensuring more equal social achievements. The introduction to the topic will be provided by an internationally renowned guest: Professor Roger Dale from the University of Bristol (England), whom we already had the opportunity to meet six years ago in our seminar.
We therefore kindly invite you to join us on Thursday, October 13, 2016 at 5:00 p.m. in room 026 at the Faculty of Education of the University of Ljubljana, Kardeljeva pl. 16, Ljubljana.
Roger Dale
Does Piketty’s Capital help us understand how education can contribute to more equal social outcomes?
Lecture given in the School Field Seminar, University of Ljubljana, 13 October 2016
Piketty’s Capital has created enormous interest around the world, not least in educational circles. One reason for this may be his readiness to refer, in a book largely focused on economic history, to the ways that education has, and might, contribute to better and more equal social outcomes. This presentation welcomes this, but argues that Piketty’s suggestions remain somewhat limited due to his adherence to a more or less distributional, rather than relational, approach; in particular, the assumption that it is the distribution of educational credentials that accounts for their contribution to reducing inequality via education is mistaken. Instead, it advances arguments which recognize the separate contributions of the content of credentials, and their valorization. The main focus of the paper is thus on the different ways that educational credentials are realized, especially on social class grounds, which, it is argued, is a major basis for the maintenance of educational inequality.
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“Throughout the book, I emphasize the importance of educational institutions (in particular the extent of equal access to high-quality schools and universities) and fiscal institutions (especially the chaotic advent of progressive taxation of income, inheritance and wealth).”
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century: a multidimensional approach to the history of capital and social classes. The British Journal of Sociology, 2014, Volume 65, Issue 4. – http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2014BJS.pdf