When British Prime Minister Tony Blair reputedly was asked at a press conference about the value of education in today’s global economy, he is said to have responded gamely with the phrase, “the more you learn, the more you earn.” The stakes of becoming middle class and reproducing class have risen, increasing the demand for cultural capital in the form of education. New middle-class families, especially in globalizing cities around the world, from London to Bombay and New York to Istanbul, have awakened to the belief that the latest round of world capitalist accumulation constitutes a fundamental shift in their ability to provide their children with what they euphemistically refer to as “a comfortable life.”

      We refer to those Istanbul families that are in competition with each other under conditions of globalizing neoliberal markets as a “new middle class.” While there would appear to be a global trend in economic, social, and cultural differentiation within a middle class, accompanied everywhere by a middle-class crisis of access to, and affordability of, quality education, the dynamics of new middle-class formation must be understood within both national and local contexts where the agency of state, market, and family mutually shape each other. Although neoliberal capitalist ideology emphasizes enterprise free from state interference, in reality the formation of the state has always played a major role in shaping the evolution of capitalism and vice versa.¹ Their interdependence and contradictions are part of the dialectic of capitalist social formation.

      The Class Analyst Is Part of Class Analysis

      Early in our research, we made a decision to focus on Istanbul middle-class households and families as agents of middle-class reproduction and transformation. At first, we focused on the meaning and content of changing household consumption habits because, we reasoned, these formed a nexus of activity at the intersection of economics and culture, a meeting of our respective professional fields of inquiry. The result was a survey we conducted in 1993 of five hundred and fifty households that (1) helped us to sharpen our understanding of middle-class social space, (2) gave us a picture of changing tastes in middle-class culture, and (3) provided us with a clear view of families that comprised a new middle-class fragment that were beginning to benefit economically, socially, and culturally due to the immanent structural transformation from welfare state into neoliberal state.²

      The survey was invaluable for locating the new middle class in districts of the city, as well as confirming characteristics of new middle-class families, but it provided little information on the dynamics of middle-class formation. This came informally through endless casual conversations with friends, colleagues, students, and families. Slowly we realized that conversation gravitated toward children and their education. The mantra of “quality education” emerged as a metadiscourse for the reproduction of social class. The discourse of quality education was interwoven with another discourse—namely, the imperative for providing their children with “a comfortable life.” Together the meanings of quality and comfort framed our formal interviews that zeroed in on winning the national Selective Middle Schools tests. Money, social connections, cultural knowledge, formal schooling, and a general sophistication in the world seemed to have something to do with a determination to win the SMSEs.

      The first national middle school tests were held in 1983, the iconic date for the appearance of important neoliberal reforms of the economy. The significance of these events and their meaning for the making of a new middle class are taken up in the next chapter.

      Theorizing New Middle-class Formation

      The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu bridged the conceptual divide between social theory and empirical inquiry, on the one hand, and on the other by reconciling subjectivism with objectivism in an effort to form a coherent theory of practice that includes both. Thompson (1991), in his introduction to Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power, offers a succinct overview of the methodological issues that Bourdieu struggled to resolve in his earlier work:

      By ‘subjectivism’ Bourdieu means an intellectual orientation to the social world which seeks to grasp the way the world appears to the individuals who are situated within it. Subjectivism presupposes the possibility of some kind of immediate apprehension of the lived experience of others, and it assumes that this apprehension is by itself a more or less adequate form of knowledge about the social world…By ‘objectivism’ Bourdieu means an intellectual orientation to the social world which seeks to construct the objective relations which structure practices and representations; it places the primary experience of the social world in brackets and attempts to elucidate the structures and principles upon which primary experience depends but which it cannot directly grasp.…Bourdieu’s view is that both subjectivism and objectivism are inadequate intellectual orientations…His alternative theory of practice is an attempt to move beyond objectivism without relapsing into subjectivism, that is, to take account of the need to break with immediate experience while at the same time doing justice to the practical character of social life (11–12).

      While Bourdieu held onto the necessity of having an objectivist approach to social life that, by definition, was not solely dependent on the interpretation of the subjects of investigation, Loic Wacquant states that Bourdieu’s guiding belief throughout his long career was the view that lived experience is constitutive of class and “cannot be directly deduced from an objectivist understanding of class structure.” (Wacquant 1991: 52). He asserts that it is necessary to understand the middle class as a historical formation “through an analysis of the whole set of creative strategies…pursued by all the agents…situated