Family environment transmits the bodily attitudes that make study succeed

Evidence

Undoubtedly the child of a traditionally intellectual family acquires this psycho-physical adaptation more easily. Before he ever enters the class-room he has numerous advantages over his comrades, and is already in possession of attitudes learnt from his family environment: he concentrates more easily, since he is used to “sitting still”, etc. Similarly, the son of a city worker suffers less when he goes to work in a factory than does a peasant’s child or a young peasant already formed by country life. (Even diet has its importance, etc.) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 369

Categorization

• XREF: Channels Bourdieu’s cultural capital and reproduces the class-analysis angle of cultural reproduction theory.
• DEEPTHINKING: Gramsci grounds educational inequality in bodily habitus — the child inherits posture, stillness, concentration before any curriculum is taught. This prefigures Bourdieu by decades and is dense enough to sit with.
• SEED: Article angle: education reform debates assume cognitive equality, but family-transmitted bodily discipline is the real hidden curriculum.