Ladder or Barrier: Reflections on Improving Preschool Teachers' Degrees in the Context of Cultural Capital

Improving the level of degrees of preschool teachers has become an important means to build a high-quality and professional teaching force. As a kind of institutionalized cultural capital, degrees are subject to the field and habits held by preschool teachers. At the institution level, higher degrees are designed as a channel for flowing into the dominant class and a cultural production path of "high quality and professionalism". At the practical level, the imperfect system affects the effectiveness of preschool teachers' degrees improvement. The disconnection between knowledge and action and the mismatch between action and will undermine the initiative of the teachers to participate in the improvement. Insufficient support restricts the transformation of degrees into social and economic capital. Therefore, it is necessary to form a correct understanding of the function of preschool teachers' degrees improvement, namely, the improvement is not equivalent to professional development. Besides, when the improvement is detached from the actual needs of education, it will lead to a blind competition and the alienation of degree education. As a result, it is imperative to start with reconstructing the field rules to innovate the system of preschool teachers' degrees improvement; take the positive reshaping of habits as the orientation to stimulate the initiative of preschool teachers to participate in the improvement; take the activation of cultural capital as the key to provide support for the improvement.