In the Shadow of the Schooled Society: Feelings of Misrecognition and the Education Ladder

Over the past decades, the education system has gradually grown into a central and universal institution of society, the impact of which plays a primary role in economic and social stratification. This stratification, and the way this inequality is legitimated, contains serious moral judgements that favor the higher educated over the less educated. This article focuses on the socio-psychological consequences of living in such “schooled societies” for those who are more or less successful in education. We use three waves of the European Quality of Life survey with data on 65,208 individuals across 36 countries. We investigate (1) the extent to which different educational groups feel dissatisfied about and misrecognized by virtue of their education and (2) whether the centrality of the education system in society broadens the gap between educational groups in their dissatisfaction with education and feelings of misrecognition. Results show that (1) the less educated are more likely to feel misrecognized and dissatisfied with their education than the higher educated, and (2) in countries where education is more central, the education gap in feelings of misrecognition is substantially larger.