Meanings and attitudes regarding education and household spending priorities of the new middle-class families in Brazil

Abstract

This study investigates how meanings ascribed to education influence lower-income parents on investing (or not) in their children’s education, and how this in turn influences family expenditures and consumption priorities. Based on 62 ethnographic interviews with individuals who had ascended from poverty to the lower fractions of the Brazilian urban middle-class, we examine differences within a relatively homogeneous fraction in terms of social status and income. Three distinct groups emerged: (1) parents who live in the favelas (slums) and see school as an agent to keep children away from deviant behaviours, (2) parents who live in the favelas and invest in education as an enabler of upwards social mobility, and (3) parents from less affluent suburbs who pay for private education to keep their children from interacting with bad influences outside the territory. Even in socially segregated territories, meanings were shaped less by parents’ amount and composition of cultural and economic capitals, and more by their own experiences with the educational system and access to positive role models (or lack thereof). It appears that the meanings attached to education end up defining family expenditures, family budget and important consumption trade-offs. In addition, our findings reveal a subtle, fine-grained mechanism of distinction based on school choice among the class fraction’s members. We draw on Wilson’s social isolation theory to show how parents of similar economic and cultural capital, and who were socialized in a similar cultural milieu, ascribe different meanings to education, and the resulting differences in household consumption patterns. We thus offer insights on the different reproduction mechanisms at play within an economically disadvantaged social fraction that had moved from poverty to the lower urban middle-class in Brazil.