The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
liberation and exposure of corruption as the means of concealment of corruption: In ever more completely delegating the power of selection to the academic institution, the privileged classes are able to appear to be surrendering to a perfectly neutral authority the power of transmitting power from one generation to the next, and thus to be renouncing the arbitrary privilege of the hereditary transmission of privileges. But, through its formally irreproachable verdicts, which always objectively serve the dominant classes since they never sacrifice the technical interests of those classes except to the advantage of their social interests, the educational system is better able than ever, at all events in the only way conceivable in a society wedded to democratic idealogies, to contribute to the reproduction of the established order, since it succeeds better than ever in concealing the function it performs. The mobility of individuals, far from being incompatible with the reproduction of the structure of class relations, can help to conserve that structure, by guaranteeing social stability through the controlled selection of a limited number of individuals - modified for and in individual upgrading - and so giving credibility to the ideology of social mobility whose most accomplished expression is the ideology of education as a liberating force. A good deal of research on mobility implicitly espouses this ideology and reduces the question of the reproduction of class relations to the question of the intergenerational mobility of individuals. Having done so, it is unable to understand everything that individual practices, particularly those contributing to or resulting from mobility, owe to the objective structure of class relations within which they take place. Thus, for example, the collective interest the dominant classes have in the preservation of the structure of class relations, hence in the evolution of the educational system towards ever closer subordination to the demands of the economy and economic calculation, an interest which entails, inter alia, sacrificing a portion of the students from those classes, is now tending, because of their over-enrollment, to come into conflict with the individual interests of the members of those classes which incline them to expect the educational system to consecrate automatically the social pretensions of all members of the class.