Cultural repertoires of school choice: Intersections of class, race and culture in Pretoria and Amsterdam

Abstract

In school choice literature, class-based strategies for social reproduction of the middle classes are often the central explanatory framework. While race, ethnicity and other social categories are increasingly included in the analysis, they are often treated as secondary to class. Drawing on interviews from a racially and socio-culturally mixed sample of middle-class parents in Pretoria and Amsterdam, this study aims to contribute to existing theories on school choice and social reproduction through a comparison of contrasting cases. It takes the dominant theoretical framework of middle-class strategizing as a starting point to explain parental practices of school choice. The comparative analysis finds some remarkable homologies of school choice in Pretoria and Amsterdam, but also points to specific local and historical complexity and specificity of parents’ motivations. In both contexts, parents call on intersecting aspects of their identity beyond their classed position. While we acknowledge the relevance of social class, we suggest that middle-class parents’ school choice should be understood as ‘strategies of action’ emanating from classed and racial (dis)positions but also cultural and religious repertoires rooted in a multidimensional tool-kit.

Negotiating the Progressive Paradox: Middle‐Class Parents in Majority–Minority Primary Schools in Amsterdam

“…Against the backdrop of this city context, we specifically focused on middle-class parents residing in Amsterdam who, additionally, opted for a majority-minority primary school for their children. In the Netherlands, there is to a large extent a free school choice, which in practice means that people without a migration background can avoid schools with a large percentage of children with a migration background (Foli & Boterman, 2022). However, in the last decade, there has been a growing group of parents without migration background who have deliberately chosen a diverse majority-minority school for their child(ren), because they believe that their child(ren) should learn to live with each other (Boterman, 2013).…”