Yun Cha, Hyejeong Jo, Yeonjin Lee, Hyunjoon Park
Since Bourdieu defined cultural capital as being separate from economic and social capital, many scholars have empirically examined its effects in various contexts. Many educational researchers have taken on this initiative by analyzing the relationship between parents’ and children’s cultural capital and children’s educational achievement.
Soo Yong Byun, Evan Schofer, and Kyung Keun Kim’s comparative study published in Sociology of Education (SOE) in 2012 on how cultural capital affects student achievement in South Korea, Japan, France, and the U.S. constitutes one such example. Using data from the 2000 Programme For International Student Assessment (PISA), they find that, as in other countries, parents’ socioeconomic status positively affects both parents’ objectified cultural capital and children’s embodied cultural capital in Korea. In contrast to other countries however, children’s embodied cultural capital was shown to negatively affect student achievement in Korea, which the authors attribute to societal contexts such as standardized educational system, emphasis on test scores, and dependence on private education.
We interviewed one of the study’s authors, Soo Yong Byun, associate professor at Pennsylvania State University’s (Penn State) Department of Education Policy Studies, to discuss the implications of their study and the meaning of cultural capital in Korean education.This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Please introduce yourself to our readers, including a brief summary of your work and research interests. How does the 2012 SOE paper relate to your general research agenda?
As an associate professor of the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State, my research interests encompass sociology of education and educational inequality. I majored in education when I attended college in Korea, but studying sociology of education as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota allowed me to extend my expertise in both education and sociology. Specifically speaking, I have done research on inequality in Korean education, focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the Korean education system from a comparative perspective. I question what mechanisms create inequality in Korea and how these mechanisms change to fit each country’s educational environment. These types of questions are what motivated me to examine the effect of cultural capital on educational achievement.
Although this paper is a comparative research on four countries, as its title suggests, you focused on the case of South Korea. Many researchers in Korean Studies state that, during the review process in a foreign journal, they are asked to elaborate on how the case of Korea informs foreign audiences. How did you navigate these requests? Do you recall any memorable comments regarding your focus on Korea?
Writing a paper on Korea for a foreign audience is indeed a difficult task. To give you some background information on this paper, it actually originated from my PhD dissertation that I wrote in Minnesota back in 2007. When I first submitted the draft to SOE, it was not a comparative research paper. Instead, I had used a Korean dataset, the Korean Education and Employment Panel (KEEP) offered by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training (KRIVET). In the paper, I found that high-brow cultural capital had a negative impact on academic achievement, which differed from the findings of other studies done in many western countries. As a result, one of the reviewers for SOE commented that he distrusted the data and questioned why similar results hadn’t been found in countries similar to Korea. In fact, the then deputy editor of SOE, Rob Warren, recommended using international data to do a comparative study on the same topic. Therefore, by the time I resubmitted it, I had discarded the original Korean dataset and instead utilized the 2002 PISA data to compare South Korea with Japan, France, and the U.S.
The next few questions will be about the contents of your paper. Considering the standardized and test-intensive educational environment in Korea, one could surmise that parents’ cultural capital has limited influence on students’ academic achievement. According to your study however, parents’ objectified cultural capital had a significant impact on students’ outcomes. How do you interpret this result?
I feel that parents’ cultural capital could have a positive impact on students’ educational achievement by affecting the familial environment at home that could in turn positively influence students’ cognitive abilities. On the other hand, the impact of children’s embodied cultural capital on their educational outcome could be explained as a zero-sum game. In an educational environment like Korea, academic activities correlate with higher grades, which means that participating in cultural activities could have a negative effect on academic achievement because it restricts time that could be devoted to studying. Furthermore, I believe that Korean teachers do not recognize or reward students for their participation in highbrow cultural activities. Rather, from my own experience, students would most likely be berated for not studying. In this sense, children’s cultural capital could negatively impact their academic achievement, whereas parents’ cultural capital positively affects it.
In this study, you examined how the effect of cultural capital, conceptualized as high-brow culture, differs in different countries. In addition to this type of cultural capital, do you think that there could be unique types of cultural capital embedded in each societal context? Considering Korean society and its education system, what other types of cultural capital could shape students’ educational experiences?
Consensus on what constitutes cultural capital in Korean society does not seem to exist. Recently, scholars have debated whether foreign language capabilities, especially English proficiency, could serve as a type of cultural capital. Foreign language as a cultural capital relates to studying abroad, which could be relevant not only in the Korean context, but also in other East Asian countries. Meanwhile, some wonder whether private education constitutes a type of Korean cultural capital. To me, private education could fit Annette Lareau’s definition of cultural capital, but not Bourdieu’s. It could be considered as cultural capital from a very broad perspective in that private education could be one type of parental involvement. To illustrate, when private tutors or lessons are used to gain acceptance into prestigious colleges, private education could serve the role of cultural capital albeit rather indirectly. But under Bourdieu’s definition, cultural capital has to not only be passed down from parents to their children, but it also has to be utilized as a means of distinguishing oneself from other social groups. In terms of private education, private lessons and tutors are relatively accessible for all social groups, including children from lower income families. In terms of foreign languages however, it not only directly affects the likelihood of students’ college enrollment, but it also influences their ability to construct and enter various social groups as adults. The same goes for parents: if parents are fluent in english, it facilitates their participation in social groups comprised of similar people. In addition, studying abroad is still relatively limited to the middle or upper class children, and fluency in english is recognized and rewarded by teachers at school. Therefore, under Bourdieu’s traditional definition, I believe that foreign languages or experience studying abroad rather than private education serves as cultural capital in the Korean context.
If you are currently conducting more research on this topic, could you briefly introduce them to us? If you could expand upon this paper, how do you wish to do so?
First, I am currently empirically analyzing the extent to which educational standardization mediates the effects of cultural capital on academic achievement. Using PISA information on 28 countries, I found that the effects of cultural capital on academic achievement are lower in countries with higher levels of educational standardization. I am in the process of writing a paper on these results, but I have yet to decide how to measure educational standardization. Measures that compare levels of standardization in different countries are generally based on how important test scores are in each country, as well as the role of individual governments in shaping the educational system and curriculum. Given that many scholars question the accuracy of these measures for educational standardization, I am trying to find a better way to estimate levels of standardization.
Another project that I am doing involves case studies. Assuming that highbrow cultural activity would have similar negative effects on academic achievement in countries similar to Korea, I have examined the effects of cultural capital in many such foreign countries. For instance, I recently examined the cases of Hong Kong and Greece and found that in both countries, participation in highbrow cultural activities did not have a significant effect on students’ academic achievement. Like this, I plan to delve into how cultural capital differently affects academic performance in different national contexts.
On the flip side, I am also looking at which students participate in cultural activities. This research question was motivated by a question that Christine Wotipka, a member of my dissertation committee, had asked me when I was a graduate student. She brought my attention to special college admissions programs in Korea for students in the arts, sports, and music. Rather than studying, students preparing for these programs would typically place more emphasis on their extracurricular activities. In this regard, I plan to use latent class analysis to examine exactly which students participate in cultural activities.
Pushing the Boundaries 