Social Capital Concepts

In class we touched over a number of core concepts that not only pertain to sociology of education, but sociology in general. These concepts include, human capital, social capital, and cultural capital. Each one of these core concepts is very important to the education system according to Lareau. In the next few paragraphs I will define and give a brief explanation for each concept and following the explanations I will answer the questions with examples from Lareau’s text. Human capital is a very easy concept to understand, it is the skills, knowledge, and other attributes that contribute to human capabilities for productive work output. Just think about why humans attend college, more than likely it is not just because they heard it will be the best years of their life, but more logically it is because humans want to invest in their future by gaining more knowledge that separates them from others. College is not cheap, you either have to work to pay your way through school or if you are fortunate enough your parents can afford to pay for your schooling. Either way money is being spent on you in hope that you will graduate with a degree that will put you in the best position to succeed when you are done with school. A sociologist by the name of Theodore Schulz introduced something known as …show more content…
Social capital is extremely important when human capital is involved. Think of it like this, human capital is the knowledge and skills we posses, and we can share our human capital with others by social capital, for instance passing what we know and learned off to our offspring or other people that we are socially connected to. Social Capital plays a major role in where kids gain there human capital, the cumulative disadvantage does a good job of explaining that kids whose parents have higher social and human capital are already ahead of kids whose parent’s have lower social and human