The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
'laissez-faire' habitus in society: If, in the particular case of the relationship between the School and the social classes, the harmony appears to be perfect, this is because the objective structures produce class habitus and in particular the dispositions and predispositions which, in generating practices adapted to these structures, enable the structures to function and be perpetuated: for example, the disposition to make use of the school (by students) and the predispositions to succeed in it depend, as we have seen, on the objective chances (nee, opportunities) of using it and succeeding in it, that are attached to the different social classes, these dispositions and predispositions in turn constituting one of the most important factors in the perpetuation of the structure of educational chances as an objectively graspable manifestation of the relationship between the educational system and the structure of class relations. Even the negative dispositions and predispositions leading (a student) to self-elimination, such as, for example, self-depreciation, devalorization of the school (academia) and its sanctions or resigned expectation of failure or exclusion, may be understood as unconscious anticipation of the sanctions the School objectively has in store for such dominated classes. More profoundly, only an adequate theory of the habitus, as the site of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality, can fully bring to light the social conditions of performance of the function of legitimating the social order, doubtless the best concealed of all the functions of the School. Because the traditional system of education manages to present the illusion that its action of inculcation is entirely responsible for producing the cultivated habitus, or, by an apparent contradiction, that it owes its differential efficacy exclusively to the innate abilities of those who undergo it, and that it is therefore independent of class determinations - whereas it tends towards the limit of merely confirming and strengthening a class habitus which, constituted outside of the School, is the basis of all scholastic acquirements - it contributes irreplaceably towards perpetuating the structure of class relations and, simultaneously, legitimating it, by concealing the fact that the scholastic hierarchies it produces reproduce social hierarchies. To be persuaded that everything predisposes a traditional educational system to serve a function of social conservation, one only has to recall, among other things, the affinity between the culture it inculcates, its manner of inculcating it and the manner of possessing it, which this mode of acquisition presupposes and produces, and between this set of features and the social characteristics of the public in whom it inculcates this culture, these characteristics themselves being interdependent with the pedagogic and cultural dispositions the inculcating agents derive from their social origin, training, position in the institution and class membership. Given the complexity of the network of relations through which the function of legitimating the social order is accomplished, it would clearly be vain to claim to localize its performance in one mechanism or one sector of the educational system. However, in a class society in which the School (the educational system) shares the task of reproducing that product of history which constitutes, at a given moment, the legitimate model of the cultivated disposition, with families unequally endowed with cultural capital and the disposition to make use of it ('consumers'), nothing better serves the pedagogic interests of the dominant classes than the pedagogic 'laissez-faire' characteristic of traditional teaching, since this action, by default, immediately efficacious and, by definition, ungraspable, seems predestined to serve the function of legitimating the social order.