HOW TEACHERS CONTRIBUTE TO PRODUCE THE PHENOMENON OF CULTURAL REPRODUCTION: THE FACTOR OF NORMALIZED PEDAGOGY

In terms of implementing social justice, education is imposed the emancipator function, referring to increasing the upward rate of social mobility for working class children through the channel of schooling in a meritocratic society. However, scholars, such as B. Bernstein and P. Bourdieu, discover the inequity of educational results and conceptualize it as cultural reproduction. They contend that this phenomenon roots in the gap between curriculum knowledge and cultural competence of working class students. This essay argues that teachers play as a crucial contributor to the issue of cultural reproduction because they do not recognize the teaching methods that they conduct normally are based on middle/upper class students. Consequently, such middle-class-oriented pedagogy tends to create advantage and disadvantage positions for middle/upper class students and working class students respectively. However, confining the narrow scope of instrumental rationality, teachers normally employ mental reasons to justify their pedagogy. In terms of uncovering this synthetic politics embedded in schooling, this essay borrows the concepts of M. Foucault, such as normalization and self-governing, to develop an argument --- normalized pedagogy.