The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
the social selection of self-exclusion: seeking to explain why a fraction of any school population eliminates itself before entering the secondary stage or during that stage and why such elimination is not randomly distributed among the different social classes, one is condemned to an explanation in terms of characteristics which remain individual, even when imputed equally to all individuals in a category, so long as one fails to see that they befall that social class as such only in and through its relation to the school system. Even when it seems to be imposed by the strength of a 'vocation' or the discovery of an inability, each individual act of choice by which a child excludes himself from access to a stage of education or resigns himself to relegation to a devalorized type of course, takes account of the ensemble of the objective relations (which pre-existed his choice and will outlast it) between his social class and the educational system, since a scholastic future is of greater or lesser probability for a given individual only insofar as it constitutes the objective and collective future of his class or category. The subjective expectation which leads an individual to drop out depends directly on the conditions determining the objective chances of success proper to his class or category. In other words, the individual makes a personal assessment based upon the apparent resources and opportunities available to the individual and then makes the decision, "That's not for the likes of us."