Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (review)

Elite boarding schools are thought of as bastions of privilege, and politicians typically claim to represent “the people,” so maybe it is not surprising that many politicians are loathe to acknowledge their boarding school backgrounds. Consider the five men who were on the Democratic and Republican Presidential tickets in 2000, 2004 and 2008. How often did George W. Bush talk about Andover, Al Gore talk about St. Albans, John Kerry talk about St. Paul’s, Obama talk about Punahou, or John McCain talk about the Episcopal School? It is no coincidence that so many of the country’s Presidents (e.g., FDR, JFK) and serious Presidential contenders went to elite boarding schools, for, despite their claims to the contrary, as the title of one of the best books about prep schools suggests, these schools are about “preparing for power” (Cookson and Persell 1985).

It is no secret that elite boarding schools educate the children of the rich and powerful, and it is no secret that these schools always have had to adjust to changing times since they were established in the late 19^th century, when they became, as sociologist (and St. Paul’s alumnus) E. Digby Baltzell (1964) put it, “a vital factor in the creation of a national upper class, with more or less homogeneous values and behavior patterns.”(127)

Over the years, Baltzell and many others, academics as well as nonacademics, have dissected the role these schools play in social reproduction and the efforts they made in the past 50 years to adapt to the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, an increasingly global economy, and the widespread corporate and cultural endorsement of diversity. At the time they were founded, and well into the 20^th century, many of these schools accepted no (or very few) Catholics, Jews, blacks, women, or students from poor or working class families. Now they do, though the numbers vary from school to school, and the schools can be quite guarded about just how many of their students are in these categories (for example, how many are on full scholarship). Periodically, students who broke gender, racial or ethnic barriers at these schools have written about their experiences, typically in memoir form, such as Paul Cowan’s (1967) recollections of being a Jew at Choate during the Eisenhower years, or Lorene Cary’s (1991) experiences in the early 1970s as the second African American female student and then, some years later, as a teacher, and, subsequently, a member of the board of trustees at St. Paul’s.

As Cary’s memoir and more recent ones by journalist Charlise Lyles (1994) and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (2011) demonstrate, these schools are part of a corporate-mediated feeder system that assures that a small number of youngsters from previously excluded and discriminated against groups enter an educational pipeline that can lead to positions of power in the corporate and political realms (especially for African Americans from working or lower class backgrounds). Scholarships for such students begin at elementary school, and they continue through middle school, secondary school, college, and graduate school. Because of this pipeline, and especially because of what is learned and gained during the years spent at elite prep schools, it no longer takes three generations to move into the national elite, if it ever did. The right socialization from 12–21 years of age is probably all that it takes (Zweigenhaft and Domhoff 2011:chap. 6).

Shamus Rahman Khan’s Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School is a welcome addition to the sociological literature on elite prep schools. Khan, like Barack Obama, is the child of parents from two different countries. Whereas Obama’s parental roots were in Kenya and the American Midwest (and then Hawaii), Khan’s immigrant father, a surgeon, is Pakistani, and his immigrant mother, a nurse, is Irish. Whereas Obama attended Hawaii’s most elite prep...