Schooling is a relational good, its consumption founded in social reciprocities. A qualitative study of the purchase and use of schooling by three middle class families challenges the view of identity formation as a project of individual self-realization. Traversing the public domain of the quasi-market of education and the private domain of the family, schooling switches from commodity to gift, entering the associated systems of commodity exchange and moral reciprocities. The tailoring to parental ends of the education offered by schools, and the co-labour of consumption within the household in the form of homework, shaped young people's identity, colonized and reproduced the family.
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