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The Three Stages of Cultural Capital. The concept of cultural endowment was developed to account for inequalities in academic performance, by stressing the inequality in the way in which the tools for the appropriation of cultural assets such as works of art were distributed. The diverse properties of this cultural endowment are literally 'incorporated'; that is, interiorised in the form of a set of permanent and lasting attitudes. The capital itself is in a sense identified with individuals; its accumulation requires time, which is a social asset that can not be acquired by proxy; it demands a personal investment of energy; the biological limitations of its System of maintenance are the limitations to its own capacity for accumulation. These specific properties, which are seen as being linked to the individual, enhance the advantages of the system of inheritance by having both the appearance of something in-born and at the same time acquired. This means that 'incorporated' cultural capital becomes the predilect means of the legitimate transmission of the human heritage at times when direct and visible forms of transmission fall into disfavour. Cultural assets (books, paintings, machines), which are the objectified counterpart to cultural capital, are transmissible immediately and may be appropriated formally as material objects. But in any one case of their transmission, they are subject to the same strictures as apply to 'incorporated' cultural capital. A last instance of cultural capital is that of academic qualifications. These, like coins, are relatively independent in value of their bearers. This certified and guaranteed form of cultural capital raises the whole question of the social functions of the educational system and may lead into a practical awareness of the relationship between cultural capital and the economic system.

Different Versions of Morality. An analysis of the school textbooks in French and Arabic used by Algerian Primary Schoolchildren, designed and printed by an official body forming part of the Ministry for Education, reveals the profound disparities in the ways in which the family, the school and the social picture as a whole are represented. In the textbooks in Arabic, we find a predominantly religious language, conveying the vision of a closed, highly hierarchical world at the basis of which lies the family and its dependent structures. The textbooks written in the french language instil a more discreet vision of the family and of society more amenable to the non-religious aspects of the modem world and bearing the mark of a universalizing humanism. These contrasts, born of differing historical paths of development of the two groups of cultured specialists who grew out of the colonial period, are not mutually exclusive; they are similar insofar as they exclude any socio-political considerations as such. This means that the message of the textbooks is in contradiction with the official political pronouncements. These findings merely underscore the exceptional weight which the petty bourgeoisie carries when it cornes to the culture and ideology of Algeria, a phenomenon which other studies have already brought to light.

Monitors in Algerian Primary Schools. The year 1962 saw the recruitment of teachers of a lower academic attainment (requirements were for holders of the Certificate of Elementary Primary Studies or equivalent) intended for service in the first full academic year of Algerian independence. Since then there has grown up a body of teaching monitors comprising those with leanings towards the French or the Arab cultures. This body of teachers represented as much as 45.3 per cent (1967/8) of the total teaching personnel in early secondary education*. Based mainly on a study on a sample of 639 monitors, this article attempts to underline the socio-political implications of an ambitious attempt to instil ideological, cultural and pedagogical abilities into subjects of differing social origin, who have pursued varying academie or professional paths and possess different types of cultural endowment. An analysis of the forms of social conduct of the different groups of monitors in relation to the training they receive, and of the social status conferred upon them by their profession and their chances of social ascent, raises doubts as to the relevance of schemes of analysis which work on the basis of syncretistic pairs of concepts such as modern/traditionally/religious, authoritarianism/liberal disciplinarianism and so on. *In France, secondary education is normally divided into two 'cycles', a 'first cycle', to which this article refers, comprising the 6th, 5th, 4th and 3th classes, and a 'second cycle', comprising classes 2nd, lst and 'Terminale', immediately prior to the Baccalauréat.

Pedagogy and Social Class. Nothing guarantees, a priori, uniformity in the pedagogical practices of nursery school teachers, since they are confronted with different situations depending on the characteristics of the social recruitment of their students. It would thus be interesting to investigate whether this fact may not be one of the principal determinants of the possible variations both in the goals the teachers set for themselves and in their pedagogical practices. The present study is based on observations made at three nursery schools (in the classes of the oldest children) in 1970-1971. These observations revealed the existence of two models, one classical and the other innovative, which differed with respect to the organization of space in the classroom and with respect to the sequence and rhythm of activities over time. When the children came mostly from middleclass families, the teachers made full use of classical pedagogy. The latter appears to be imposed, upon the children to a much greater degree, however, when they corne mostly from a working-class background. The innovative model, observed only with the children of working-class background, seems to overcome certain of the difficulties of the classical model, and it testifies to an effort to accord a greater autonomy to the pupils. One may wonder about the ultimate effects of this attempt to adapt teaching methods to the kind of student involved. Will it lead to a reinforcement of pre-existing inequalities through the modification of the teacher's expectations according to the pupil's abilities, or will it tend, instead, to compensate for these inequalities through the benefits yielded by techniques better adapted to the pupil's needs ?

A Second Family. A private secondary school in the Paris area is the starting point for an examination of a peculiar form of harmony between the history of a school, its position in the field of Catholic education, the recruitment of its teaching staff and its teaching methods, and the expectations of its pupils and their parents. Originally a parish school, then a privately-run concern without State support, the school is on the very boundaries of the Catholic educational System. Its teaching staff is closer in kind to the home-bred executives of a small business than to the public employees of the State System. The staff are characterized by their 'ethical qualifications' rather than by any official qualifications or degrees. As a result of the changes within the educational System and above all, the so-called disciplinarian and political problems encountered in State-run establishments, the uniqueness of the school lias grown in contrast to the rest of the local schooling and the parents who place their children with it use its teaching staff not only for the instruction of their children but also for the instilment of moral attitudes which are deemed essential to academic success. The time-oriented regularity of the classes, the constant interchange between school and parents are at the very basis of a teaching technique which while maintaining parental surveillance of the child assumes itself the role of substitute-family for the pupil.

Criteria of Teaching Ability as a Source of Conflict. A study of the manifold interpretations of the notion of 'teaching ability' as implemented by the Examining Boards of the competitive examinations* and the Inspectors of Educational standards, headmasters and secondary school teachers themselves, reveals how each of these classes of individual seeks to win general acceptance for its own definition of the division of labour in schools. The methods employed by the CAPES** and Agregation examining Boards and the school Inspectors show har far they deem teaching ability to be a lesser form of cultural ability as a whole. It is this cultural ability which is at the basis of the promotional and professional hierarchy of the teaching profession. Even if teachers, through their own prior contact with the educational System, have corne to identify this administrative standard of their ability as their own, they only partly adhere to the method of control utilised by the school Inspectors; in effect, each inspection seems to call into question their professional ability and, furthermore, their professional experience tends to suggest that teaching ability amounts to a God-given 'gift*. The headmasters' own point of view on teaching ability is basically at loggerheads with that of the teaching staff, and such a situation, the result of their entrenchment in their own professional position, creates a climate of potential conflict affecting almost every aspect of the behaviour of teachers. * Notably the CAPES and Agregation, mentioned below. **CAPES: French equivalent of the Dip. Ed. in England: the teachers training examination.

Towards Greater Democracy or Increased Paths of Relegation ? Between 1958 and 1976 French State secondary education underwent major transformations as a result of the massive input of new classes of pupils hitherto excluded from secondary education. The de facto increase in the age for compulsory school attendance was ratified in 1959 by an act which makes school attendance compulsory to the age of sixteen. Up until 1975, Schools sifted these new arrivais by new streaming patterns and class-differentiated types of schooling. Despite a statistically detectable increase in equal opportunity in the recruitment of school-children, a fact supported by the increasing number of pupils in the first cycle* of secondary education, the joint interplay of academic lag stretching back to the earliest days of language apprenticeship, stream-switching and the relegation of pupils into lower grade streams of study tends to eliminate from 'full-length' secondary education (that leading to the Baccalauréat and including the 'second cycle' of studies) and above all from the prestigious stream 'C' (Sciences) a significant portion of children from working class backgrounds, who, starting at the lowest end of the entry scale**, might have had high hopes of making the higher grade. A further point is the levelling off of equal opportunities in full-length secondary education around 1967. No improvement has been demons-trable in ten years. The establishment of the 'single stream'*** System during the first three years of secondary education tends to conceal the workings of social selection which had been apparent until then in the way in which children were classed and streamed according to differing social background. The major shift over twenty years in secondary education may thus be described as a shift from outright exclusion to the relegation of a major proportion of working class children. It has perpetuated and legitimized a System of inequalities and has done so despite, or because of, the lessening of explicit selection methods. *First cycle. The 'Premier Cycle' of the French Secondary Education comprises three steps; 6th, 5th and 4th. **The 'lowest end of the entry scale' refers to the first step of the first cycle, the '6th'. ***'Single stream' approximates the 'College unique' System in French secondary education prior to entry into the 'second cycle' where pupils are not yet streamed according to study preference but pursue identical curricula.