A Long-term Approach to Teachers' Legitimate Cultural Practices: Stability in a Time of Change?

While the link between legitimate culture and categories of graduates has been redefined in recent years, how much is this also true for schoolteachers? Sharing many of the dynamics experienced by other graduates and facing changes in their sociological characteristics, primary and secondary school teachers may have developed new cultural practices. Using Ministry of Culture and Communication surveys, I demonstrate that variations over time in cinema and theatre attendance and regular book reading are not the same for "primary school teachers and comparable occupations," "teachers in secondary and tertiary education, scientific occupations" and other categories of graduates. In order to investigate further I use a method based on a comparison of two surveys conducted in 1970 and 2008, which enables me to analyse changes in the cultural practices of teachers in secondary education alone. A decline in the consumption of legitimate culture is observed that is only partially explained by changes to the sociological characteristics of secondary school teachers over the period studied.