The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
functional duplicity in academia: Given that the historical and social conditions defining the limits of the relative autonomy an educational system owes to its essential function define, at the same time, the external functions of its essential function, every educational system is characterized by a functional duplicity which is actualized in full in the case of traditional systems, where the tendency toward conservation of the system and of the culture it conserves, encounters an external demand for social conservation. It is precisely its relative autonomy that enables the traditional education system to make a specific contribution towards reproducing the structure of class relations, since it only need obey its own rules in order to obey, additionally, the external imperatives defining its function of legitimating the established order, that is, to fulfill simultaneously its social function of reproducing the class relations, by ensuring the hereditary transmission of cultural capital, and its ideological function of concealing that social function by accrediting the illusion of its absolute autonomy. Thus, the full definition of the relative autonomy of the educational system with respect to the interests of the dominant classes must always take into account the specific services this relative autonomy performs for the perpetuation of the class relations: it is precisely its peculiar ability to autonomize it functioning and secure recognition of its legitimacy by accrediting the representation of its neutrality, that gives the educational system its peculiar ability to mask the contribution it makes toward reproducing the class distribution of cultural capital, the concealment of this service being not the least of the services its relative autonomy enables it to perform for the conservation of the established order. The educational system succeeds so perfectly in fulfilling its ideological function of legitimating the established order only because this masterpiece of social mechanics succeeds in hiding, as if by the interlocking of false-bottomed boxes, the relations which, in a class society, unite the function of inculcation, i.e., the work of intellectual and moral integration, with the function of conserving the structure of class relations characteristic of that society.