The contribution investigates the understanding of education as a strategy to cope with educational inequality related to gender, class and migration. Focusing on the trust in education as a generalized meaning of qualifications, processes, and institutions in school and job-related training in the context of biographic narratives from selected Koreans and  Brazilian we present first results from biographical research on trust in education. Thus, on one hand we highlight generational, class-related and cultural conditions of socialization for the development of trust in educational institutions and systems. On the other hand these attitudes are showed to be important mechanisms for coping with educational inequality. The paper will therefore combine case studies from different research projects in a sociological approach on educational inequality and in a cross-cultural perspective.

The study belongs to a research network founded by the German Research Foundation on ‘Trust in Education – Development of Trust’ which is investigating processes of trust development in social and professional contexts. Based on current sociological approaches on the importance of trust for the reduction of the complexity of social settings, and for social integration and community building (i.e. Giddens 1996; Luhmann 1989) within the network the authors focus on the development of trust in education at the areas of socialization, biography and enculturation. From a sociological point of view trust in education must be understood as generalized relation of the individual to institutions, processes, and qualifications of the educational system.

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