Playing the Game: Illusio and the Cultural Normalisation of Shadow Education in Greece and Beyond

Shadow education has become a defining feature of contemporary schooling systems, yet dominant explanations continue to emphasise access, market expansion, and examination pressure. This article advances a sociological account of how shadow education becomes culturally normalised within contexts formally committed to public educational equality. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of illusio, I conceptualise Greece as a dialectically hybrid neoliberal-traditionalist educational field, in which market logics of optimisation and competition interact with moral obligations of family sacrifice, kinship duty, and educational honour. The article draws on a qualitatively driven mixed-methods study conducted in rural Pella, Greece, combining an online survey of 110 individuals who had completed secondary education within the previous five years with 24 semi-structured interviews (14 students and 10 tutors). Survey findings informed participant selection and identified broader participation patterns, while interviews examined how tutoring became culturally meaningful and morally necessary. The findings show that shadow education functions as a culturally expected norm across all capital positions. However, inequality is reproduced less through differential participation than through the quality, prestige, and strategic convertibility of tutoring. I argue that this produces a distinct mechanism of symbolic violence within universal participation, whereby unequal pedagogic infrastructures are misrecognised as stronger work ethic, greater seriousness, and deserved merit. Comparatively, Greece emerges as a familistic Southern European mass-participation shadow education regime, where neoliberal educational rationalities are culturally re-encoded through kinship obligation and welfare fragility. More broadly, the article contributes to debates on educational inequality by showing how marketised hierarchies become culturally experienced as necessary, legitimate, and deserved.