Sociological Analysis on Parental Strategies and the Education Market stratification, publicness, privatization

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This study examines the relationships between parental strategies and class closeness, by using data from the interviews and questionnaires to parents having preschool, primary or junior high school children - conducted in Japan in November 2006.This paper focuses on parental intentional/ unintentional strategies in terms of social stratification, publicness, privatization, examining parental views on care and education of their child, school choice, daily childrearing practices, their own life style, and their opinions to recent educational reforms.This study is largely motivated by sociological concerns about social class and education. The concept of 'strategies' is drawn from P. Bourdieu's framework, which use the term 'strategies' to describe relationships between class, habitus, and practice.Examining the data from the point of view such as trust, gender, anxiety, parental aspirations, educational cost and so on, analysis included here show how contemporary families in Japan segr … More egate or divide themselves relating to family socio-economic status through their educational strategies. Care and education of their children are critical moments for them to distinguish themselves from others, in terms of both dispositions and practices.We suggest as follows :First, parents' cultural capital has large influences on their parental strategies. Facing economical globalization, some parents in Japan no longer give their trust to the public school system. Such trends are also enabled by some state policy and educational reforms based on neo-liberalism.Second, there are some relationships between parents' some aspect of capital -social, emotional, economic, cultural. Therefore higher class families take their children's education more seriously. The higher the parent's class status, the more likely their children go to cram school. They are unlikely to trust public school than lower class. Higher class families can choose private schools while lower class families cannot do so. So class closeness grows stronger according to parental school choice. Less