Can children break the cycle of disadvantage? Structure and agency in the transmission of education across generations

Abstract

Research has shown that parents tend to pass educational advantage or disadvantage on to their children.However, little is known about the extent to which the intergenerational transmission of education involveschildren’s agency. In this study we drew from two traditions in sociological and social psychological theorizing–the theory of cultural and social reproduction and the theory of human agency –to examine whether agencyinfluences children’s educational performance, and if so, whether this influence can be observed among childrenacross social classes. We used data from the Spanish sample of the Program for International StudentAssessment (N= 25,003 15-year-olds). Results indicate that the level of child agency was weakly positivelyrelated to social class, that child agency impacted on a child’s educational performance, and that the positiveeffect of agency on educational performance did not vary by social class. This suggests that strategies to enhancedisadvantaged children’s agency may prove useful in reducing social gradients in educational performance.More generally, our findings may ignite a debate about the role that social structure and human agency play inshaping social inequality and mobility.