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, elementary and secondary schoolteachers may have had new life breathed into their cultural practices. We demonstrate, using Ministry of Culture and Communication surveys, that variations over time in cinema and theatre attendance and regular book reading are not the same for ``schoolteachers and comparable occupations,'' ``teachers in secondary and tertiary education, scientific occupations'' and other categories of graduates. In order to investigate further we use a method based on a comparison of two surveys conducted in 1970 and 2008, which enables us to analyse changes in the cultural practices of teachers in secondary education alone. We observe a decline in the consumption of legitimate culture that is only partially explained by changes to the sociological characteristics of secondary school teachers over the period studied.