How essential is cultural capital to education ?

So I just had a professor go through my marks and one thing he said at the end is effectively you have to start moving around the students in the class with higher grades. I am by no means a poor student, mostly within the high 60s, not superb but decent for college i guess. It seems though that no matter how hard I try, i just can't seem to go into the next boundary.

The other thing he said though which I found interesting is that he came from a social background where he didn't have the cultural capital needed to fully understand what it was that lecturers were looking for. It wasn't until he became one himself that he finally understood.

It struck me but I understood and wasn't offended by it. I understood what he was saying. There are somethings that intrinsically you won't know what to do because it's never been a part of your socialisation. What compounds that is that I wasn't raised in the country and my parents don't really have the social network that could expose me to certain things.

I'm just feeling a bit stuck on what I'm supposed to do here. The obvious answer is to expand my circle but I don't really have the confidence to put myself in those spaces. I don't see any commonalities between myself and the persons I should model my behaviour on. Ultimately as well, what I see as important to life and what they see as important differ. We also don't do the same activities, and quite frankly I don't even have the money to say that I'll do the activities to atleast say I've done them. So what do I do?

It's concerning because it's not just a college thing, it extends throughout your life. I mean am I supposed to accept that based on the theory, my lack of cultural and by extension social capital will stunt my economic growth for the foreseeable future. Even on the education level is it just a case of accepting that I may never get certain grades because I lack the cultural capital on how to write what's being looked for?

Submitted January 12, 2024 at 06:31AM by B_Butterball18 https://ift.tt/xwy3LJo