In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

88 / Part II bureaucratic world from which he would escape. Such restraint can occasionally be upended. Once a neighbor sent the police to the Blue House with a complaint that the music was too loud. During a heated phone conversation with the neighbor, Rod yelled “fucking asshole!” and hung up. Buck later discovered that the neighbor had provoked this uncharacteristic reaction by calling Rod an “elitist snob.” Aware of Rod’s position in the Brahmin world and of the importance of his contacts for the survival of the school, Buck is often the recipient of remarks that remind him of who and what he is serving.16 One of the wealthier boys inferred that the home Buck struggled to build that houses his family was “not a bad cabin.” And while, through credit or other arrangements, Buck keeps two brand-new cars in his garage, their contrast with Rod’s battered Volvo articulates rather than bridges the social distance between him and the Brahmin. This symbiotic tension between class-based administrative styles illustrates Mountainview’s complex pedagogy. Encounters with aristocratic and civil servant versions of Mountainview’s education remind the boys that their delinquency is from a higher social order than their counterparts in the urban and rural middle and lower classes. Immersed in the bounties of indulgent childhoods juxtaposed with neglect, abuse, and lurking expectations, parents and children, wounded from their primal battles against the backdrop of institutionalized preparation for sustaining privilege, come to Mountainview School seeking guidance, absolution, and redemption. The Embattled Entitlement Path As children of corporate executives, entrepreneurs, producers, publishers, literary agents, lawyers, doctors, and “old money” families, Mountainview’s students often grow up in fashionably luxurious urban and rural enclaves throughout America.17 A boy from a famed family of great wealth provides as his address the name of the mansion where he resides. Another boy’s wealthy southern family vacations at a Gatsbyesque summer estate on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Nearby their “camp,” a substantial rustic guesthouse with cathedral ceilings and enormous fireplaces adjoins sizable shoreline property. Another student, whose grandfather was president of a major American automobile company, is periodically flown to his mother’s lavish Puerto Rican resort home, where she recently dined with the mayor of New York City. At a Mountainview “prize day” commencement, a recently hired housemaster was told by a graduating boy’s grandfather that his grandson wanted to be a writer. When the housemaster suggested that the boy should become a professor because “it would leave him time to write,” the grandfather replied that this would not be necessary as his grandson had an ample trust fund. Following the ceremony, the housemaster remarked to an alumnus from the early 1980s Mountainview School / 89 that “the place reeks of old money WASPs.” The offended alumnus replied, “Mountainview runs on very little money.” Before finding their way to Mountainview, these boys attend Taft, St. Mark’s, Groton, Choate, Gould, The Hill School, Lawrenceville, Avon Old Farms, Deerfield Academy, The Hyde School, and lesser-known prep schools such as Dublin, Providence Country Day, The Darrow School, Dummer Academy, The Christ Church School, and Winchendon Academy. Whether old-money aristocracy, nouveau riche entrepreneurs, or professional meritocracy , the families of Mountainview students, with the exception of a few local working-class boys, attempt to orient their children toward some version of the Protestant establishment. Enrollment in prep school is preceded and seasoned by continuous exposure to family and friends among “the best and the brightest,” heavy doses of exotic travel and other cultural enrichment , and a succession of obligatory, upper-class rituals, communities, retreats, and preening calculated to acclimate these boys to the world they have been born into or for which they have been chosen. This state-of-the-art preparation for upper-class leisured cosmopolitanism and occupational life necessarily exposes their elders’ attempts to mitigate the financial and other profanities they associate with being at the top. Like their third-generation, new-middle-class brethren,18 some of these boys have been subjected to their parents’ utopian and communal ventures. Inextricably drawn into the complexities of their elders’ lives, the boys discover that the older generational redemptive initiatives are ritually segmented from the parallel mainstream lives and economic ties that subsidize the redemption. Awareness of the moral ambiguity associated with their elders’ cosmopolitanism becomes a basis for anticipating costs related to the paths of gentility these boys have been chosen to ascend. The opportunities to serially explore such upper...

Share