The concept of cultural capital is a major one in sociology of education. Since the crucial work of Bourdieu and Passeron (1964, 1970), sociologists of education indeed consider that cultural mechanisms are crucial for understanding educational inequalities. However its relevance to understand the current processes of educational reproduction has been subjected to several important criticisms.

Beyond the debates about the definition of the concept, opposing supporters of a narrow definition (the highbrow view, DiMaggio, 1982) and supporters of a more expansive definition (the concerted cultivation view, Lareau and Weininger, 2003), there seems to be an agreement among scholars about the need to disentangle the concept. If culture matters for school success it is not for arbitrary reason but because it contributes to cognitive and behavioral outcomes (Kingston, 2001), as shown by those who have compared the relative academic effectiveness of different highbrow culture (De Graaf et al., 2000 and Sullivan, 2001), or those who have begin to investigate the educational profitability of new cultural practices, such as computer skills (Paino and Renzulli, 2012) given the decline of legitimate culture among the upper classes (Peterson and Kern, 1996). It also appears that if culture matters it is not necessarily as a form of capital (Kingston, 2001). The capital metaphor (Bourdieu, 1979) may be inappropriate and is challenged by researches raising the issue of cultural transmission and showing that there is no automaticity in cultural heritage (Lahire, 1995; Henri-Panabière, 2010). It requires a intensive mothering (Vincent, 2010) and parental control of what is transmitted, which is increasingly difficult because family education is contested by other agencies of socialization (media and peers in particular that contribute to a relative homogenization of teen culture, Pasquier, 2005).

After having reviewed the main criticisms about cultural capital theory, we will suggest that if a lack of cultural resources undoubtedly remains a cause of early school failure, it cannot fully explain anymore the systematic better attainment of upper-class students. And yet understanding the educational reproduction also supposes to explain the success of the young upper class and the attainment inequalities between high achievers from lower and upper classes and from different fractions of middle classes. Precisely, the sociological literature on elite education highlights a series of new behaviors and distinctive strategies employed by the upper classes that facilitate academic achievement and socio-professional integration of their children (school choice, search for privileged information about elite schools and tracks, internationalization of educational pathways, shadow education...) (eg, Felouzis and Perroton, 2009 ; van Zanten, 2010 ; Draelants, 2012 ; Buisson-Fenet and Draelants, 2013). I will suggest that, insofar as they do not require any work of socialization or direct transmission from parents, these behaviors and strategies are better understood as involving social and economic capitals rather than cultural capital (even though the result may be cultural capital). I will thus argue that, in a regime of parentocracy (Brown, 1990), elite reproduction is increasingly conditioned by social and economic capital, rather than by direct transmission of cultural capital.

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