- [Voiceover] There
remains a huge amount of social inequality between rich families and poor families. One of the things that we know is that this large social inequality between the rich and families
with much more resources, and the poor elements of society seems to replicate itself
across generations. So if we label this first
group, "Generation one," and the second group, "Generation two," a large group of people
who have rich parents tend to end up pretty wealthy themselves. And people who had poorer
parents tend to end up poor. This is actually a process that's called "Social Reproduction." And what social reproduction means is that we are reproducing the social
inequality across generations. There must be reasons to help
explain what's happening. One of the things that we see
that wealthy families have is all these dollars here. They have a lot of what's
called "Financial Capital." The useful thing about financial capital, and capital suggests
that when someone has it they can invest in something
and get some returns, The good thing about financial capital is you can invest it into other things. You can invest it and obtain
what's called "Social Capital." And essentially what social
capital means is building up reliable, useful social networks, networks of trustworthy,
useful connections. >From those connections you can really obtain opportunities and
advantages in society. The other thing that financial
capital can expose you to is something called "Cultural Capital." What cultural capital is talking about is a few different things. So, for example, if your parents are regularly exposing you to trips abroad and you may be learning foreign
languages, such as French. They may be taking you to
movies, to the theater. You could have a fine appreciation of classical music, for example. You may know all the social nuances of the local golf club,
know how to play polo, know how to do the things
that many middle-class and upper-class children know how to do, and have those experiences. You may also have cultural
items within your house, such as paintings, portraits
and other cultural artifacts, and you may know a lot about them. Your parents will clue you in. And both those things, social capital and cultural capital, they're capital. So with this understanding
you may gain some rewards. Part of that reward is
that these two processes, these two capitals, can actually turbo-charge this social reproduction. But, hold on a second. Even if someone is really poor, won't they have social capital? They will certainly have social networks, and they will certainly have culture, and cultural experiences. But I'm gonna bring
something else into this mix. I'm gonna bring something
that you would think would help to break all of this up. I'm gonna bring our educational system in. Because one of the
things you can say to me is that, hold on, doesn't
our educational system give the poor a chance
to break out of poverty and the rich, they presumably get a good education anyway, right? Doesn't it give a chance to
kind of shake up the system, put everyone on an equal footing? Think about this. Does our educational
system value the culture of people from the
lower classes as much as the culture of the people who
have got much more resources, may come from the higher classes
or more privileged classes? For an example of this will be graffiti. If a child knows all about the graffiti in their local neighborhood,
I'm not too sure our educational system would care as much about that as it would fine art. What we may find is
that educational system really doesn't value the
culture and the social networks of the poorer population, or the less advantaged population. But what it does is really values the cultural capital and social capital of the more wealthy people. So, in fact, our educational
system can be reinforcing this social stratification
that we see here. The children of rich
parents are more likely to be wealthy themselves, and the children of poorer parents are more likely to be, to stay poor, compared
to their richer peers. So actually our educational system may be reinforcing social reproduction. Now obviously, a lot of
this may be controversial and people may argue against it. And there are a lot of
different variations and other, and aspects to consider. But this is just a brief
overview of social reproduction.