Understanding working-class learning with Bourdieu: Yorkshire, 1820-1900

Working-class adult learning was a significant feature of political agitation, industrial religion, and civic associations between 1820 and 1900. The importance of learning was such that all working-class political movements had stated educational aims, and most religious denominations used adult education to retain the loyalty of their congregations. The educational efforts of so many impoverished adults initially seem to challenge Pierre Bourdieu’s theory that social inequalities are reproduced because individuals in subordinate groups are discouraged from acquiring cultural capital. Nevertheless, working people saw knowledge as socially valuable, and generally prioritised forms of cultural capital that Bourdieu regards as ‘legitimate’. Therefore, using Bourdieu’s conceptual tools to understand adult education offers a way of understanding the complexities of motivations to learn as well as the methods and impact of learning for working people. Research has demonstrated the dialectical nature of the relationship between learning and political agitation before 1850. Historians tend to overplay the significance of a subsequent shift towards individualist middle-class educational values after 1850. Using Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of habitus, capital, and field to analyse the working-class learning in mechanics’ institutes and mutual improvement societies in Yorkshire demonstrates that this is an oversimplification. Whilst working-class individuals and associations unconsciously recreated aspects of bourgeois culture in their learning, we should reject the implication that learners accepted the bourgeois logic of the social and political field.