Revue française de pédagogie, n°224/2024

This issue examines the ways in which cultural capital is transmitted in the most culturally rich families, in the light of the osmotic transmission hypothesis first formulated by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron in Les héritiers. This notion, put forward as a hypothesis, was intended to give meaning to the correlations between cultural inheritance and educational success. The aim of this issue is to examine it empirically, in the light of current modes of transmission of cultural capital, in order to assess its legacy sixty years on.
The articles are based on surveys of actual practices that reveal the transmission of cultural capital by those involved in family socialisation or "delegated" by the family (in cultural institutions in particular). They show the systematic, regular and ongoing action taken by these agents to enable children to integrate highly valued cultural knowledge (language, art, etc.).
The contributions collected here all examine the way in which these actions are carried out on a daily basis and show that they have nothing to do with the spontaneous absorption of socially valued ways of seeing, feeling and speaking: systematically and tirelessly correcting children's spontaneous speech errors, enriching and increasing schoolwork in a domestic setting to improve performance, passing on the rudiments necessary for learning to read, or appropriating works of art from museums as part of an extracurricular initiation are all expressions of an inculcation process that is not very visible from the outside, but is real. However, there are also practices that make the work of transmission invisible, reinforced by new conceptions of childhood and conducive to giving the appearance of absorption by osmosis.