The Enigmatic Academy: Class, Bureaucracy, and Religion in American Education

Part II. Mountainview School

II Mountainview School C loistered beyond the turmoil of mainstream society, the American upper classes maintain a circuit of exclusive private preparatory schools designed to calibrate youth from privileged families for participation in the top levels of power at the institutions that shape and direct the nation’s foreign and domestic policy, as well as its commercial and artistic endeavors. The preparation in these schools involves not only attaining academic skill but also cultivating acumen in styles of domination required of managers and boards in commercial corporations, cultural institutions, and government bureaus and cultivating a basis for cooperation with and co-optation of new-middle-class aspirants. Youth from upper-class families and the less privileged who finesse their way into the higher circles may generally accept the polishing and prepping they encounter at these academies. But in their response to upper-class socialization, a minority of these youth reject the preparation. In their rejection of “polish” and the all-too-complicated array of involvements and expectations that word implies, they may pose a threat to the dominant class. Rather than discard these miscreants, havens are created for their reeducation and rescue, rarified locales of redemption where deviance may be confronted and seduced into accommodation and rapprochement . Mountainview School is one of these places of retreat and rehabilitation. In their own search for secular redemption, the American upper classes harbor an ambivalence toward the civilizational uses to which their gentility has been applied. As Boston Brahmin, proper Philadelphian, and last-ditch southern aristocrat faced post–Civil War industrialism, those traditional upper classes who hoped to endure collaborated with the Robber Barons and provided educational “polish” for their children in elite universities even as they attempted to exclude nouveau riche vulgarity .1 Those aristocrats who wanted to sustain their wealth and power had to accept the changing terms of success in business, politics, the professions , and culture as technological innovation, corporate expansion, and the industrialization of war necessitated occupational retooling and close collusion with new wealth and new middle classes. Since “breeding” had always been valued in the corridors of power, and aristocracy lends its quality of manners, dress, speech, gesture, and carriage to leadership, it was inevitable that “gentility” would continue to serve as a standard to which new wealth and the new middle classes would aspire, caricature, 74 / Part II and acquire.2 While often as contemptuous of nouveau riche vulgarity and middle-class pretension as it was ambivalent toward the emerging industrial bureaucratic world, old wealth penetrated new institutions, marketing its image of gentility as upper-level management. Establishing standards of demeanor for participating in the corporate world; electoral politics; the national security establishment; legal, credit, and investment firms; the noble professions; philanthropy; education; and the arts, the old and new upper classes sustained more than a foothold in industrial America.3 As twentiethcentury corporate expansion, wartime victory, and Keynesian policies amalgamated vestiges of Jacksonian democracy and aristocratic gentility into a generic managerial style, the upper classes encountered a bureaucratic world from which they were neither exempt nor immune.4 Ambivalence toward the problematic basis of their wealth, the bureaucratic uses of their gentility, and their profane participation in the workaday world informs the otherworldly direction of the upper classes and their youth. Attempting to escape from while denying its ties to business civilization, quiet money finds rural, island, port, mountain, and small-town enclaves of regional and exotically international natural beauty for their tennis, golf, equestrian, garden, and other fashionable leisured escapades.5 Protecting their estates, villas, ranches, beaches, wild life sanctuaries, clubs, and “bohemian groves,” these seemingly impenetrable retreats eventually attract upper-middle and new-middle-class communities with their inclination for elite and alternative schools, music and arts festivals, vacation retreats, healing centers, social change institutes, activist politics, and mainstream and countercultural businesses and specialty shops.6 Mutual dependency, bordering on the symbiotic, characterizes the relations between a leisured aristocracy seeking revitalization and new-middle-class professionals, culture vultures, activists, visionaries , and entrepreneurs searching for “gentility,” upper-class subsidization, and customers. This alliance between the old and new aristocracy and the cultured upper and new middle classes in education, the arts, politics, and philanthropy is indicative of a class and generational reconciliation between those who represent and those who may appear to reject traditional American values. A new provincialism focused on an aristocratic appreciation of amateurism and lurking virtuosity, amid local yokelism, characteristic...