Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School

The William G. Bowen Series

by Shamus Rahman Khan

As one of the most prestigious high schools in the nation, St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, has long been the exclusive domain of America’s wealthiest sons. But times have changed. Today, a new elite of boys and girls is being molded at St. Paul’s, one that reflects the hope of openness but also the persistence of inequality.

In Privilege, Shamus Khan returns to his alma mater to provide an inside look at an institution that has been the private realm of the elite for the past 150 years. He shows that St. Paul’s students continue to learn what they always have — how to embody privilege. Yet, while students once leveraged the trappings of upper-class entitlement, family connections, and high culture, current St. Paul’s students learn to succeed in a more diverse environment. To be the future leaders of a more democratic world, they must be at ease with everything from highbrow art to everyday life — from Beowulf to Jaws — and view hierarchies as ladders to scale. Through deft portrayals of the relationships among students, faculty, and staff, Khan shows how members of the new elite face the opening of society while still preserving the advantages that allow them to rule.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Education, Anthropology, Class, School, Politics

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

I teach in the sociology department at Columbia University. My work is on inequality. But instead of looking at the poor -- as most scholars do -- I study the rich. This is because over the last 40 years the rich have largely driven the increases in inequality.

My first book, Privilege, is a study of St. Paul's School, one of the most elite boarding schools in United States. I studied St. Paul's to better understand how social advantages are produced. The question I'm most interested in is how social institutions have opened their doors to those they previously excluded (nonwhites, women, etc.), and yet as they have become more inclusive, our nation has become much more unequal. "

Reviews

[Lizzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was tempted into this book by a youtube clip from an interview with the author. That clip hit the highlights of this book: namely, that elite secondary schools continue to reproduce the privilege of wealthy elites but they do so while also perpetuating a narrative in which rich kids succeed because they are talented, gifted, hard workers, ect. and not because they are rich.

Some of Khan's narrative passages early on have a captain of the obvious feel- yes, schools (like other institutions) socialize their members by diminishing the importance of previous identities and pressing upon members a new sense of who they are and how they relate to other actors in the new environment. So yes, we see the "newbs" at St. Paul's experimenting with dress, musical tastes, and speech until they find paths for success in this new structure. Duh.

Far more interesting was Khan's ability to unpack a seeming contradiction: American wealth has become more concentrated in the hands of elites (the infamous 1%) at the same time that civil rights movements have borne fruit in greater diversity (although nothing close to parity) in American educational institutions. I like Khan's conception of democratic inequality, in which a certain amount of diversity, combined with a narrative of meritocracy, creates the illusion of an open society while obscuring systems of oppression that continue to produce structural inequality in American society. Khan highlights that while students in elite schools may work hard (although there is no guarantee that they do) and demonstrate ease within a variety of academic and cultural situations (although that ease may mask lack of knowledge or superficial thinking), these students tend to be relatively average in their native talent. Yet the narrative of families, schools, teachers, and peers encourages the perception that the fruit of their labors (Ivy League school, high paying job) is the result of sheer native talent and hard work vice accumulated social capital (and a high school that spends $80k per student!!!). The corollary to this argument is that working class people are not a class per se (operating within political, economic, and social constraints) but rather people who have failed to work hard and who have closed themselves off to the pick-and-choose variety that defines elite cultural values.

Khan's other intriguing point is that social capital is not knowledge/goods, as commonly envisioned, but rather physical and social practices that must be embodied, performed, and accepted by the given audience: "So the analogy of cultural capital as 'money in your wallet' is somewhat misleading. Instead, I most often thought of culture in a relation way. My observations guided me to think of culture as a practice, not a possession." In Khan's analysis, elite schools reproduce privilege by taking children of elites and instructing them how to embody the attitudes and practices of the elite (to be at "ease" in a wide spectrum of situations and to be comfortable relating to authority figures and playing by the rules to ascend hierarchical structures). Students of color and women students have a more contentious relationship to the hierarchy- as they are visibly and inescapably different from the norm they must be more self-conscious and deliberate about how they relate to others. This self-consciousness interrupts their embodiment of elite status (ie "ease") and can prompt these students to swallow the elite school narrative of unalloyed meritocracy with more than a few grains of salt. Interestingly, Khan argues that class background does not have this effect- class can effectively be laundered through the gradual embodiment of elite practices whereas race and gender are less fluid categories. The presence of non-traditional students at these schools perversely reinforces elite students' self-perception as high-achievers (although when race or gender pops up to make systematic oppressive hierarchies visible, as in the case of the black teachers sitting at the very back of the room, elites feel great discomfort).

Worth the read and certainly there was more than a few moments of wry self-recognition for me, although my high school was a far cry from St. Paul's. If privilege is the ability to *not* think, to *not* worry, to *not* have to compensate for how others will perceive you, then elite schools surely foster the privilege of elites who are told they succeed because they work hard, compete in a fair system, and win based on native talent. Khan argues that these schools reproduce elite status while hiding the mechanics of structural oppression behind a curtain, never challenging students to evaluate the nature of their relative success and prosperity.

[Maynard Handley · Rating 1 out of 5]

The product of a very confused author...

Some future Nietzsche is going to write a history of our time called "The Genealogy of Morons", in which (s)he discusses how slave mentality slowly took over our discourse, so that we slipped from being angry that only the rich could be educated to being angry that the educated were rich.

This book is an example of a general inchoate anger we're seeing that insists on confusing a (totally justified) anger at the rich and the dominant political class, with anger at the hard work and intelligence that allows outsiders to succeed. It's not longer enough to be angry that Senator Snootington III's son will have an easy path through life, we now have to complain that spending time on homework, or cultivating self-control, are unfair ways of gaining an advantage in life. Every idiocy you thought you'd seen the last of when the unsold copies of _The Greening of America_ were pulped is back with us.

So for this author, the complaint against a boarding school is not that it costs too much but that it is "unnatural", as is the complaint against much of the teaching. At no time is it ever considered that, perhaps, the natural state of man over-rated -- this is an author firmly on the side of Rousseau rather than Hobbes, though determinedly uninterested in the life of the actual Rousseau, or how his vague fantasies and ungrounded claims played out in history.

There's scope for sensible things to be written about privilege in America, both that based on wealth and that based on education+intelligence. There's scope for considering how society should educate those who are not in the top 10% of intelligence, or how to cap the rewards accruing to those who are most blessed. But none of this is achieved by complaining that genuine education is "unfair", and that creating an environment in which such education can flourish is "unnatural".

A far better book would, for example, have compared St Paul's to a few other schools that demand excellence from their students, but are not synonymous with wealth, for example perhaps Bronx High School of Science and some of the KIPP academies, along with, perhaps, some different types of schools (eg military academies) that are likewise boarding facilities but synonymous with neither wealth nor a focus on academic excellence. Too much of what is claimed here is based on a sample of one, fed into a pre-existing (not very sophisticated) theoretical framework.

[Kathrina · Rating 2 out of 5]

A rough start, but the second half made some interesting points, mostly that the 21st century new elite are omnivorous cultural consumers that are trained not particularly to know more but to know differently, taught to synthesize and connect rather than absorb and remember.Rather than learning 'secret' or exclusive knowledge about how to be, they embody their privilege through an extended period of practice.

[Marta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book explained so much of what I have observed but not understood. Highly recommend.

[Nina Krasnoff]

This was for school but I’m adding it here anyway. I have a million thoughts but mostly: this is a fascinating book & I could talk about probably every single page of it for hours. It helped me think through so much of my daily experience and I’m really interested in the comparisons it helped me draw to my own high school experience at a school that is trying (and in a lot of respects, I think, failing) to recreate an elite education without the price tag (edit: on further reflection I actually think there’s a strong argument that that is not at all what GSSM is trying to do… food for thought) Anyone who works at or attended any private school could get a lot out of this book

[brunella]

así que llevo pensando mucho tiempo en la educación y sus roles y sus promesas; llevo pensando en particular en esta en relación a las escuelas de élite, siendo que llevo en instituciones así más o menos desde los catorce. a lo largo de ese tiempo he pasado por toda la gama de sentimientos posibles que una puede tener respecto a las instituciones educativas: las he odiado, las he resentido, las he sentido demasiado grandes para mi, las he mirado con condescendencia y me he sentido indigna. en ocasión también las he adorado, creído con fuerza fanática en sus promesas, abrazado el lujo y el privilegio que me han dado, la manera en la que han insulado mi futuro de un número tan grande de worst-case-scenarios; no sería incorrecto decir que las miraba enamorada, porque, en efecto, hacia alguien que te viste y alimenta y cría no se puede sentir mucho menos que amor

cómo comprender, entonces, estos sentimientos encontrados. la razón atrás de mucha desilusión, como lo veo yo, es que estas instituciones son los únicos mecanismos de movilidad social que se le presentan a una persona joven. mecanismos reales que permiten saltos cuánticos: son el único lugar donde alguna persona de un barrio empobrecido puede conversar con el hijo de diplomáticos, sentarse al lado del hijo de millonarios, entablar una conexión real con el hijo de académicos. los seleccionados para dar este trayecto son muy pocos, los suficientes para mantener viva la llama al centro del deseo demente de otros -- ya sea el de los padres de Nueva York que luchan para que sus hijos entren a Stuyvesant, el de los nenes chilenos matándose para conseguir una beca al Instituto Nacional hace cincuenta años, o el de los tongsheng que aspiraban a convertirse en jinshi durante la China dinástica. Y más adelante, los adolescentes que sueñan con los Grandes Ecoles, la Ivy League, las Universidades Imperiales, las SKY. es un poco injusto asumir que todas estas instituciones, y las relaciones que mantienen con sus sociedades y con sus alumnos y aspirantes, son iguales. la educación significa tantas cosas para tantas personas, incluso en nuestro contexto particular actual: es una fuente de estructura, estabilidad o destrucción financiera, movilidad social, estatus, identidad, o simplemente, en el caso de los colegios de élite, la descarnada ambición de ganar, de ser el mejor, de escalar al tope de cualquier jerarquía presentada en frente de uno. pero en el plano de lo explícito, se nos dice que estos lugares son casas del conocimiento. espacios donde uno se dedica a expandir y transmitir lo más bello y valioso que las mentes humanas tienen para ofrecer. que esto, por si mismo, es una fuente de significado, la brújula de una vida

uno crece luego, por supuesto, y se da cuenta que esto es mentira; que el mercado académico es triste y solitario, que los hommes de lettres son reliquias, que los graduados de nuestras grandes instituciones se dedican en números preocupantes a hacer trabajos falsos para industrias destructivas; que nadie lee los libros asignados en el colegio, que todos estamos aquí para la hora del cóctel que dura, dependiendo de tu institución, de tres a seis años. nos decimos que estas instituciones son espacios de cultivación humanística porque la verdad (uno atiende para mejorar su clase o perpetuarla) es demasiado cruda. porque no se le pueden explicar la importancia del pedigrí y la clase a un adolescente cuyo mundo consiste del pupitre de adelante y el pupitre de atrás; porque los adolescentes aún creen en el valor de los libros y pueden encarnar como muy pocos ese deseo desenfrenado de ganar, de ser los primeros. son nuestros mejores sabuesos. a estas instituciones, mientras tanto, les permitimos vestirse en ideas de igualdad y diversidad y talento porque eso permite que nuestras actuales estructuras sociales se perpetúen. no comprendemos, por supuesto, que distinguir entre mejores y peores aún sugiere una jerarquía, que en el caso de estados unidos aún estamos tratando los títulos universitarios como títulos nobiliarios. pero una élite diversificada aún es una élite, aún concentra una cantidad obscena de recursos.

me interesa la historia emocional de la educación, la educación como artefacto cultural, la pregunta puramente material de para qué sirve el colegio. el libro de khan es perfecto para estos propósitos. condensa cosas que llevo intuyendo un tiempo pero que no había encontrado manera de verbalizar; útilmente, también me ha demostrado que muchos problemas de interacción con los que llevo lidiando el último año eran fundamentalmente problemas de clase:

“The assumptions of a St. Paul’s education: ease only comes once you buy into the belief that the St. Paul’s way of acting is really the right (natural) way to act. It’s not some artificial form of bullshit; it’s the way the world works. (...) While the school and its students talk relentlessly of hard work, merit, and excellence, almost no one talked about what this emphasis meant for those who weren’t at the school. Carla asked these questions. And her answer was that these privileged groups had a way of “knowing” the world that was their own. Not hers. (...) Poorer students are more willing to accede their own version of the world, whereas non-white students are less willing to give up their world to adopt the Paulie perspective.”

creo que por esto nunca he tenido demasiada paciencia para aquellos que insisten que su manera de ver el mundo es la única, que se rehúsan a comprender su contingencia. igualmente que no tengo ya tiempo para las personas que insisten en llenar la conversación con la lista de ministros y celebridades y artistas que han conocido esa semana; si uno necesita sacralizar su día a día (en efecto, convencerse de la excepcionalidad de su vida) para sostener su ego, sean bienvenidos, pero no intentemos usar esto para ejercer dinámicas de poder raras a la hora del almuerzo. reconozcámoslo como los coping mechanisms que son. en fin, el libro está lleno de ideas así, claras y afiladas, inmediatamente reconocibles para quien ha pasado el tiempo suficiente en estos lugares. al final dice lo obvio sobre la superficialidad de la promesa moderna de la meritocracia, pero el hecho de que esta promesa perdure a pesar de ser tan delgada es lo importante: aún nos gusta creer en las ideas de la cultivación y el conocimiento, aún las amamos, incluso cuando son las piedras angulares del mundo hostilmente desigual en el que vivimos. lo dice khan al cierre del libro:

“The result of our democratic inequality is that the production of privilege will continue to reproduce inequality while implying that ours is a just world; the weapons of the weak are removed, and the blame for inequality is placed on the shoulders of those whom our democratic promise has failed.”

en fin, lol, estoy entrando a estudiar a Yale este Agosto

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shamus Khan provides a fascinating look at an elite school in New Hampshire, where he notes that a different narrative for self-fashioning is emerging among students:

One of the ironic consequences of the collectivist movements of the 1960s has been the further triumph of the individual and the death of the collective. Groups gathered together—blacks, women, gays, immigrants—to argue that the properties that grouped them should not matter. It should be our own human capital that matters; we should all have opportunities based on our capacities, not on some characteristics ascribed to us.

The elite have largely adopted this stance. They have gone from seeing themselves as a coherent group, a class with particular histories and tastes, to a collection of the most talented and hardest working of our nation. They look more diverse, by which I mean that they now include members they formerly excluded. They have rejected moat and fence building around particular resources and qualities that might identify them as a class and have accepted the fundamentally American story of “work hard, get ahead.” They think in terms of their individual traits, capacities, skills, talents, and qualities. They certainly know that these are all cultivated, but this cultivation is done through hard work, and access is granted through capacity rather than birthright. Recall the three lessons of privilege that I outlined in the introduction: (1) hierarchies are natural and can be used to one’s advantage; (2) experiences matter more than innate or inherited qualities; and (3) the way to signal your elite status to others is through ease and openness in all social contexts. Inequality is ever-present, but elites now view it as fair. Hierarchies are enabling, not constraining. It is the inherent character of the individual that matters, not breeding, or skin color, or anything that smacks of an old-fashioned collectivity.

There's a great deal of information about the school that's fun to read about, and his reading of the narrative being generated isn't implausible. It's particularly hilarious when he points out that while the students fancy themselves as budding scholars capable of contributing to scholarship, their actual effort and ability is mostly buffoonery and bullshit:

the pedagogical philosophy of St. Paul’s prides itself on teaching grand ideas and weaving innumerable texts into a big-picture vision of Western culture. The students quickly learn to do the same. The results, however, are mixed at best—audacity has its price. Making compelling connections takes a deep understanding of the texts involved, as well as their surrounding contexts. The beauty and the absurdity of St. Paul’s is that it cultivates the assumption that students can and should be making these connections, all the time, whether or not they know what they’re talking about.

…The curriculum is set up to demand that students make connections across disciplinary lines. They are taught philosophy, history, English, art history, sociology, political science, and economics in the same class. Similarly, in math classes teachers talk about how the ideas they are learning are connected (or used) in the work they are doing, or have done, in science. Arts classes, too, are structured in dialogue with the happenings of humanities. If this sounds like an educational system ideally set up for training dilettantes, I don’t think that caricature is far off. The classes I observed abounded in variations on the interaction described above. The conversation of the day wasn’t great for learning Dickens but certainly would make for good cocktail conversation.

…the school’s emphasis on “habits of mind” ultimately translated into clever but insubstantial ways of relating each text to something else, of talking around ideas rather than engaging with them. They did not know anything concrete about the Enlightenment. They knew how to talk as if they did (and fool me in the process, which perhaps is more important than knowing anything). When I later inquired why I had been asked to teach Spinoza, of all people—a notoriously difficult writer and hardly a “common” philosopher who might be known by a high schooler—I received a smiling, wry, and infuriating answer: “I saw his name once; I always liked that name. That’s how I picked it.” I was fooled because rather than display any competence, August and Lee asked for something innovative. They wanted to combine novels, operas, and paintings with philosophy, talking about ideas of morality not just in the context of theorizing but in the arts and literature. I was carried away by the exciting possibility and, in this excitement, never uncovered that there was little behind this talk.

While this is the most interesting part of the book, it also seems to raise more questions than it answers. I have little interest in the self-fashioning of these supposedly elite kids for its own sake. Instead, it now seems like a pressing question about how to square this lack of ability with their eventual successes. He answers this in part when he talks about the way a wealthy school like St. Pauls spends an enormous amount of money per student and has connections with university admissions offices, like:

St. Paul’s has almost one hundred formal organizations and far more informal ones. With only five hundred students, this effectively meant that nearly every student could run one of these groups (particularly by their senior year); similarly, the breadth of the academic offerings gave students options for excelling within the different academic divisions of the school. Through these nearly countless areas the school is structured so that every student can find a space to be one of the best at something.

…Even the best of high schools cannot convince top colleges that they should accept students who are not at the top of their graduating classes. How, then, do these schools make most of their class in the top 5 percent? There seems to be an impossible math going on here. How is it that the bottom 50 percent of these high school classes are still getting into outstanding colleges?

The first thing to note is that the bottom 50 percent of a St. Paul’s class is very strong. The year I taught at St. Paul’s the average SAT scores were 1390/1600. That’s slightly below the average score of the Harvard freshman class (1470). But more important, the seemingly impossible math becomes possible when we realize that there are lots of 5 percents. We typically think of the top of a class as being an academic category. This may be particularly true for most high school students who are ranked. But St. Paul’s refuses to rank its students. And its grading system (high honors, honors, high pass, pass, and fail) does not allow for the construction of a grade point average, as grades are categories, not numbers. These impediments to a single scale upon which students from St. Paul’s are evaluated are telling. The trick is to create as many scales as possible. So while academics are one dimension upon which to compare students, there are many others we could look at. There are sports, arts of many varieties, even community service—a whole host of arenas for success. If you can get almost all of your students above a basic performance bar where they will be attractive to colleges—high enough grades and board scores—and then create lots of places for them to do well, then suddenly you have lots of “best” students.

But what happens after they join Harvard en masse? Do their overinflated academic abilities serve them well there too (suggesting it's a scam all the way down), or are they forced to develop new ones? Or is the "ease" they develop at St. Paul's somehow key to understanding future success? Or does none of this matter, and it's just the money that propelled most of them to St. Paul's that matters? Or is it simply some kind of institutional inertia keeping an essentially arbitrary pipeline flowing? The point here is this: a study of St. Paul's in isolation from every other institution is simply not very insightful about how elite networks work. Understanding the changing ways students self-fashion is interesting and we can appreciate how such narratives *might* ward off some questions. But that by itself just doesn't seem like much to me.

This is particularly so because Khan doesn't even explore the nature of the self-fashioning he is so eager to reveal - for example, is this his summary of various attitudes or do students actually subscribe to this new story? Eg: When he talks about the students being cultural omnivores and claims that now "The effect is to blame non-elites for their lack of interest," do students actually blame non-Paulies for their choices and relative career shortcomings, or is this just his reconstruction of their worldview and its logic? Or (as is suggested earlier in the book) do the students simply not think about outsiders too much? I want to know what students actually think about inequality, how they actually wrestle with it, not just a rational reconstruction!

Even if such questions are reasonably cast aside as beyond the scope of a single researcher, even some generalizations made did make me a little skeptical - e.g: how much can really be understood about gender asymmetries by the experience of one non-conforming lesbian and one over-working unpopular girl, contrasted with the single example of a male president of the student body whose coming out was celebrated? Or given contradictory judgements about belonging and clothes, why does he feel so confident about deciding which view is shared broadly and which isn't? Maybe he does have hard numbers or good reason for his decisions, but since they're not provided, I came away uncomfortable with the sturdiness of his story.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book more than I thought I would. I bought it because I took a seminar by the author where he talked about the culture of elites in relation to The Great Gatsby. He studies the rich in the US in order to better understand inequality "because they are the ones who control most of the money." In Privilege he studies students at one of the most elite high schools in the country. These students believe they work harder than others and that is why they get into the best colleges. But this is not the case. The students do work hard but it is the exposure they get to so many different experiences and the confidence that comes with this cultural knowledge that sets them apart. The ability to be comfortable in any social situation is what they learn in school.

[DM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Accessible and fascinating. If you are familiar with sociological work on class (Bourdieu/habitus/etc) probably nothing too new but applies them in an engaging way. I loved the concept of "ease" and it helped me make sense of so much of what I've seen at elite schools. Good read for any student entering a privileged university and hoping to make sense of the culture.

I wish he had expanded more on his point about the expansive curriculum and its relation to privilege. Not sure I agree it is necessarily a causal relationship---what about other schools w/ that kind of sweeping curriculum? Wonder how it works in other contexts. Really interesting nonetheless.

[Zhijing Jin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The kaleidoscope of modern society (1st-world countries + China):
(Perspective 1) Elites' worldview:
(a) Privilege (Khan, 2013)
- Key point: Invisible consolidation of stratified classes under the name of liberty. Elites are convinced that their success is due to their hard work.

(b) The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates(Golden, 2005)

(c) Rich Dad, Poor Dad (Kiyosaki, 2000) [My review]
- Key point: (For rich or educated people) Once you used the proper method, financial freedom is very easy.

(Perspective 2) Extreme poor people, or demotivated middle class:
(a) Poor Economics (Banerjee & Duflo, 2011) [My review]

(b) Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
(Boo, 2012)
- Key points: Poor communities also has lots of politics, e.g., it is really hard to get your own apartment even if you work hard, because your neighbors will be jealous and use dirty tricks to deprive your hope to leave the poor community.

(c) 岂不怀归：三和青年调查 (Tian 田 & Lin 林, 2020) [My review]
- Key points: No motivation to work hard, and almost live with no dignity. It is fine just to stay alive with a very low consumption level. These people also tend to get comfort from video games, small-scale gambling, etc.

(d) 下流社会 (Miura 三浦, 2006) [My review] [Different types of classes]
- Key points: When the social classes are too stagnant, young people are deprived of motivation to work hard. Instead, Japanese middle class tend to stay single, eat 1-person lunchbox from convenience store, and spend more time in KTV, anime, etc.

(Perspective 3) Theories to explain the polarization of classes:
(a) Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty & Goldhammer, 2013)
- Key point: R > G, the speed how rich people increase their wealth is larger than the average economic growth, so the gap of poor and rich people will be larger. Main reason why tax cannot help is that rich people tend to have a stronger voice when designing policies.

(b) Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Streek, 2015)
- The problem of democratic capitalism grows bigger and bigger with each financial crisis, e.g., welfare society induces more and more cost and many bureaucratic things that cost excessive money; outsourcing industries to cheaper countries also causes a problem.

(Perspective 4) Aging people:
(a) Middle Age: A Natural History (Bainbridge, 2018)
- Key point: Old people tend to feel frustrated because of the degrading physical ability. In an i.i.d. setting of the society, they tradeoff age with more experience and knowledge about the world, but in a quickly changing society (e.g., with new technologies), they tend to feel outdated and disappointed.

(Perspective 5) Other common perspectives for the US:
(a) The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America (Bryson, 1989) [My review]
- Key point: revealed how lives and attitudes in different states are.

[Alexander Boyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review yesterday of Berlin's Karl Marx was so trash and so pompous that I feel the desire to start anew. I guess this is my first try at a new tone, but I expect it'll be more of the same.

At the halfway point of Privilege, I gave thanks that the end of this slim book was neigh. Oh how I wished to emulate those St. Paul's students who only read the SparkNotes! Alas, I knew that I would not pass the debate my younger brother was preparing for me the second I came downstairs, so I endeavored to finish it and was glad I did. The final chapter, Learning Beowulf and Jaws is brilliant (as loaded as that word is when used in the St. Paul's context.)

In the book's last pages, Khan finally pumps the breaks on the prep school myth, asking and answering the question that haunts the book all along, "Why does it mean to present material in this way to teenagers? Perhaps the point is not really to know anything." My brother scribbled "savage" in the margins after one particularly Mask Off line (revealing myself as one of those know-nothing omnivores here). The Prep School education teaches one to know nothing but perform everything. Who needs to read when you can question? Khan rightfully calls bullshit, and consistently shows that these "elite" are really not so elite, that their gilded futures are less product of a carefully constructed facade of hard work but rather a product of their class. As a former teacher myself, I related to Khan's disappointment when his carefully planned introduction to Enlightenment thinking foundered on the rocks of his student's (eventually refreshing) ordinariness. Unintentionally or not, Khan's conscientious and rigorous teaching-style comes through clearly in the book. I deeply respect his commitment to pedagogy, and am always ashamed at how poorly prepared I was to teach when reading accounts like his!

Where the book truly falters is in its fourth chapter when discussing sexuality. A hazing incident described is shocking, yet not surprising. The author strangely doesn't seem to investigate further. Why were older girls shoving bananas down the throats of younger girls? Surely at least in part because having a banana shoved down your throat against your will was a staple of St. Paul's sexual culture (See: Owen Labrie). Apart from their undeniable depravity and sadism, the older girls were also (in my estimation) initiating the younger girls into the toxic and demented culture that had grown in the school where faculty were supposedly so invested in student's lives. While this book was finished before Labrie and #MeToo, it is a glaring blind spot. The focus on female bodies is particularly unoriginal. An investigation into rape culture, and what that means about hierarchies in elite spaces, would have been more fitting.

I went to a high-performing public school in Massachusetts, a place where the "elite" among us went to private colleges, myself included. Sometimes, this made reading Privilege tedious. Who didn't arrive at a private college and look around to find that most people are average, even if they flaunt it differently? The hardest part is realizing that you yourself are also average, which was the parting message of the notoriously difficult English teacher I had in senior year of high school. (I couldn't help but wonder what his actual grade distribution looked like after reading about a similar teacher at St. Paul's who awarded more students highest honors than any one else, one of the consistent good details that save the book).

I found too much of the book unoriginal, and the obsession with the French preposterous! I kept asking, why is what happened in one French academy in 1968 so important?

Read this book for Learning Beowulf and Jaws. Sharp, curious, human, a great chapter. As for the rest... if you have the privilege to spend your day lazing about reading and thinking about what you've read, I recommend picking up something else.

I've set writing 50 book reviews as a New Years resolution, which means that I'm going to be insufferable on here for all of 2021. Cheers.

[Todd baron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Working at an elite school, this is fascinating. Especially in light of the class structure any elite schools pretend doesn't exist.

[max theodore · Rating 3 out of 5]

We may have a diverse elite class. And this I imagine will no doubt be trotted out by the elite to suggest that ours is an open society where one can get a fair shake. But diversity does not mean mobility and it certainly does not mean equality. Ours is a more diverse elite within a more unequal world. The result of our democratic inequality is that the production of privilege will continue to reproduce inequality while implying that ours is a just world; the weapons of the weak are removed, and the blame for inequality is placed on the shoulders of those whom our democratic promise has failed.

read for a sociology class; probably 3.5 stars. this book uses a specific elite private high school to make a broader point: that while people of various races and genders can climb higher than ever in modern society, class divisions still exist, and the kids getting into top schools are still pretty reliably the richest. rich people these days put less stock in their birth and more in their Good Old American Dream Grit, ignoring the fact that they have obvious advantages from birth even when they are genuinely talented.

it's a good and important point and the book is interesting enough, but the prose sometimes gets repetitive and i wish khan had gone further with some of his arguments. i know i cannot hold nonfiction to the standards of fiction when it comes to prose and how well a book grips me, but i am also a weak little baby who reads 90% fiction and i've read some really stunning nonfiction and this is just fine.

[Eli · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh my god what the hell. will never look at boarding schools or anyone who went to one the same way. sociologically fascinating too, hierarchies are only useful for the upper class to keep everyone else out. stay woke.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an extremely thoughtful and entertaining ethnography. It was really interesting to see Khan study an institution that was so formative in his own education. His insights made me reconsider a lot of the similar dynamics that I experienced in my high school years at Andover and will make me think more critically of the social dynamics around me in college.

One of the most interesting observations that Khan makes is that the pedagogical method of choice at St. Paul's (as is the case with Columbia's Core Curriculum) privileges breadth and making connections across works, cultures, and time periods. This organizing principle understandably devalues the particularistic and domain specific knowledge- a fact of which Khan seems to be keenly aware. In his own work though, the attention to place and the specific narratives and his careful and insightful (but not over reaching) generalizations seem to demonstrate a more humble and epistemology, one that would be helpful for today's "young elite" to aspire to.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is right up the Joyce alley of "sociology books about (elite) education and its intersection with class" so my enjoyment is to be expected. Well-written and engaging, with occasional lapses into rehashing old history/theory that I didn't personally find interesting but is also, understandably, included to make the historical lineage of Khan's ideas clear. The concept of the "hidden curriculum" is not a new one but it was particularly well-illuminated for me here and made me engage with my own "hidden curriculum" and educational experiences. Khan's core point about the ease of privilege and how it is inculcated while we're young is particularly interesting. I also enjoyed the intersectionality of his approach, with a clear-eyed understanding of how race and gender impacted the experiences of the students at St Paul's.

(I do think it's a little disingenuous for Khan to describe himself in the introduction as having abstained from the Ivy League elitism of his peers when he went to an elite liberal arts college, but that's not relevant to the book itself.)

[Kallan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish there were more ethnographies like this one that manage to be academically sound while still appealing to a larger audience. My two issues with this were that 1) I didn’t see how some of his observations were unique to St. Paul’s, as I recognized them in my own public high school, and 2) I wish he would have done more to disclose how his own education at St. Paul’s shaped his perceptions on his return.

[Rachel Bayles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an enjoyable book, but you really have to be interested in the topic. It helps paint a fairly detailed picture about why private school is so different, and why it helps create and/or perpetuate habits and attitudes. Sometimes the author goes a bit too far (or maybe not far enough), but in general its a useful piece of work. I look forward to seeing what he writes next.

[Jill Crosby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a lot of new info here, though Khan’s meticulously recorded case studies help illustrate the concept that elitism is alive and evolving in ways to preserve itself in a more diverse society.

[izrtkfliers · Rating 4 out of 5]

What jumped out to me from this book is not only how elite prep schools cultivate a sense of 'ease' for its students, but how vastly different the way it teaches is compared to other high schools. A common complaint is that Ivy-obsessed students are by and large striving meritocrats who work hard and shape their lives under enormous pressure to enter prestigious colleges. They are, the refrain goes, not taught 'how to think' in high school because they're too busy focusing on getting As, winning competitions, and doing volunteer work.

St. Paul's eschews all that by shaping its curriculum around 'big questions' and encouraging apparently Socratic-style dialogues across a broad range of subjects, from 'high' to 'low' culture. The SPS students and alumni interviewed in this book are proud of how their education 'taught them how to think'. They aren't taught 'facts' but rather how to make connections across fields, learning comfort with both high and low culture--or as one student in the book puts it, 'bullshit'. The author himself is quick to point out:

Asking big questions seems profound, but you cannot be wrong. The point is to develop a voice, and interpretation, and a way of articulating it. While most schools across the nation are busy disciplining students into taking regular tests—tests that evaluate cities, districts, schools, teachers, and students—St. Paul’s is making such concreteness irrelevant. It’s not about knowing those things for these kids. It’s about this vague, intangible way of knowing that becomes embodied ease. And rather than using standard benchmarks against which to measure students, St. Paul’s is cultivating individual characters that are later used to explain their success.

It's interesting to think about this difference in how the 'elite' at prep schools are taught compared to all other schools, including highly selective public schools. Unlike the classic image of the hardworking 'striver' who takes 5 AP classes and who still have to prove themselves by amassing the ECs and character required to enter prestigious universities, prep school kids are inoculated into a culture where they are already special, and not embodying ease--'trying too hard'--is frowned upon.

[Behrooz Parhami · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the unabridged 9-hour audio version of this title (read by Neil Shah, Tantor Audio, 2017).

Born to well-to-do immigrant parents, a surgeon and a nurse, sociologist Shamus Khan attended the elite St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, graduating Magna cum laude, with distinction in several subjects. He later returned to his alma mater as part of his work, writing on the sociology of elites, inequality, gender/sexuality, and American culture.

St. Paul's has educated generations of wealthy, establishment families. As a student, Khan didn't quite fit among those with backgrounds vastly different from his. Whereas newcomers were allowed in, they weren't truly integrated with the elite, who maintained their advantage by subtle modes of segregation in socializing and even seating in concerts and other events.

St. Paul's graduates went on to attend elite colleges, not on the strength of their records, impressive as they were, but primarily because their counselors had close working relationships with recruiters at Ivy League schools and other prestigious institutions. The counselors worked relentlessly to get favorable placements for their charges. So, these students enjoyed the triple advantages of excellent education, well-rounded extracurricular activities, and short-cut paths into elite universities.

Khan finds that today's students at St. Paul's continue to learn how to embody privilege, as they always have, but they are taught to succeed in the face of changing social norms. He shows that the new elite navigate the opening up of society, while preserving the advantages that allow them to rule in a more diverse, yet still unequal, society.

[Stoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very insightful. I learned a lot about how the 'elite class' is still alive and well and dominating society, having sneakily adapted to modern 'woke' culture. I personally believe social class is the most significant way our society is divided, but I've wondered why it seems increasingly harder to distinguish the social classes. Everyone always seems focused on dividing society by political beliefs, religious beliefs, ethnic background, etc. This book definitely helped me understand better why this is, and from novel angles that never occurred to me.

Also, cool method of 'ethnographic study' by living and teaching in the school. Felt authentic and did a good job convincing me of some counter-intuitive points. My only criticism is some excessive repetitiveness.

[Tim Parise]

"Why, if the world has changed so much, has who we are changed so little?" Shamus Rahman Khan asks the reader of Privilege halfway through this study, reflecting on the contradiction between the apparent openness and diversity of American elite institutions in the twenty-first century and the simultaneous growth of social inequality. It is a question he is unable to answer convincingly.

Khan begins by summarizing the evolution of elitism in American society, which he traces through three stages: the colonial and postcolonial aristocracy, among whom inherited titles and property determined status; the old elite of the young United States, among whom wealth acquired through industrial enterprises determined status; and the new elite, among whom individual achievement within the perceived framework of a meritocracy determines status. He briefly sketches the historical development of American boarding schools in the nineteenth century and the role they played in the evolution of the elite by shaping the moral character of young men who were destined to become "soldiers for their class." A notable omission here is the lack of any reference to the work of Sylvanus Thayer at the US Military Academy, whose "Thayer System" of education, which focused on stripping students of their individuality and remolding their behavior through constant drills and distraction, formed the basis for much of the subsequent design of American academic institutions. Khan then examines in detail the three lessons of privilege that are the basis for new elite formation at his alma mater, St. Paul's: hierarchies are natural but must be concealed, privilege means being at ease regardless of the situation, and status is defined by personal experience rather than innate qualities. Life at St. Paul's is structured around the constant use of ritual and tradition to imbue students with a constant sense of having to navigate a social hierarchy, making them take its existence for granted. At the same time, it teaches them that by participating in that hierarchy, they become exceptional individuals who deserve positions of rank at the apex of other hierarchies. Success at St. Paul's depends upon students giving up their self-identity to remake themselves in the "Paulie" model, even to the extent of learning a uniform way of using language and framing their thoughts in order to fit into that model. Those students succeed best who view the model not merely as one way of doing things among many, but as the natural order. Students must learn to appear at ease in navigating the overlapping hierarchies within the school, projecting confidence and even indifference. Khan's repeated stress on the importance of "ease" to modern American elite culture also recalls the cultivated insouciance of the British aristocracy, as summed up by Agatha Christie in The Secret of Chimneys : "The majority of people are always wondering what the neighbours will think. But tramps and aristocrats don't—they just do the first thing that comes into their heads, and they don't bother to think what anyone thinks of them. I'm not meaning the idle rich, the people who give big parties, and so on. I mean those that have had it born and bred in them for generations that nobody else's opinion counts but their own."

The final chapter, in which Khan explores the treatment of academics at St. Paul's, is perhaps the most informative and thought-provoking in the book. St. Paul's actively encourages its students to think of themselves as the best in the nation and even the world, constantly recognizing the importance of their achievements in public forums, but requires little genuine effort from them. Students perform being busy but take frequent shortcuts; instructors foster the illusion that they are tough graders but hand out regular high marks all the same. More importantly, St. Paul's contents itself with giving students broad, shallow exposure to a wide range of information, art, and cultures, teaching them that personal experience, interpretation, and point of view are more important than facts and reasoning. The result is a body of graduates who can make superficial connections and talk about almost any subject with an air of false familiarity. As Khan explains it, this cultural omnivorousness is a key component of the worldview of the new elite: it allows them to pose as open-minded and knowledgeable and thereby to distinguish themselves from the lower classes, who are stuck (by choice) in their own narrow ignorance that limits their social and economic advancement. Inequality, to a Paulie, is explained by the failure of most Americans to take advantage of the potential available to them in a meritocratic society. Khan's most telling point comes when he observes that the St. Paul's "breadth without depth" approach to academics fosters the idea that, in decision-making processes, experts can be brought in as needed to provide detailed knowledge while the elites are doing the important work of putting it all together. The outcome of such an attitude is readily apparent in any look at American politics, in which elite leaders' policy decisions often depend on whatever preferred expert a leader or group of leaders is relying on for advice, and in which special interest groups have disproportionate power to shape general policy. While this is a strong analysis, Khan overlooks that the St. Paul's emphasis on the importance of lived experiences over abstract knowledge, and the resulting reliance on and respect for technocratic experts that it inculcates, can also be found in the contemporary American public school system detached from any context of elite preparation.

Throughout the book, Khan repeatedly expresses puzzlement at how, while elite institutions have come to appear to be more inclusive, elitism and inequality still persist in American society. This question recurs because he never bothers to define the elite. As Khan does realize, "hierarchical structures are necessary for any elite to be an elite."  In modern societies, these hierarchical structures are provided by the state.  The existence of an elite is inseparable from the existence of the state.  The state in its turn is defined as an entity that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within a society.  An elite within a state, therefore, consists of those individuals who have greater access than their fellows—unequal access—to that monopoly on violence.  So long as the state exists, an elite will exist.  So long as a small group of individuals retains the exclusive use of organized violence to funnel resources and advantages to themselves and shape society in whatever way they find advisable, inequality will exist.  So long as the primary requirement for membership in a modern elite is a willingness to use indirect force for the benefit of oneself and one's class, elite institutions will respond to these needs by selecting and training individuals who are capable of behaving in this same way regardless of their superficial differences in gender or race.  Schools such as St. Paul's play a vital role not just in the process of elite education but also in the process of elite selection. They pick out the individuals most likely to buy into an elitist worldview, winnow out the dissidents, train the survivors into thinking that they are superior to others because of their talents, and then send them on to another level of education—most significantly the Ivy League—at disproportionately high rates to continue the process. With the experience of boarding school and Ivy League education behind them, these young elites are then able to achieve high rank in elected office, the bureaucracy, the armed forces, business, finance, law, and academia at disproportionately high rates. (A graduate of Harvard is over a hundred times more likely to be elected to the US Congress than anyone who has not gone to Harvard.) In these capacities, they control the organized violence of the state and the elite selection process, using both to perpetuate themselves. Because Khan refuses to treat the very problematic notion of what an elite is, or the pragmatic functions that elite education performs, he is unable to explain the perpetuation of elites and inequality convincingly. His study would have been much more compelling had he chosen to examine how institutions like St. Paul's translate wealth and talent into preferential access to violence.

And this is where Privilege becomes truly revealing about the St. Paul's experience.  What does Khan declare is the first lesson of St. Paul's?  "Hierarchies are natural."  Khan holds three degrees in sociology from institutions other than St. Paul's.  At some point in his academic career he must have been sufficiently exposed to cultural anthropology to have learned, intellectually at least, that hierarchies are not natural, but rather supplanted what such anthropologists as Christopher Boehm and Richard Borshay Lee described as a state of fierce egalitarianism within the last 5500 years.  The natural human impulse is not to seek increased social status, but to exile or kill anyone who attempts to gain social status.  And yet so deeply ingrained in Khan are the lessons of St. Paul's that he doesn't fully appreciate this.  Decades on from his St. Paul's experience, the school's artificially constructed values, not his mature academic experiences, are still shaping his conclusions.  That is both the highest tribute he could pay to his alma mater and a vivid illustration of how successful St. Paul's is at developing the very sense of privilege that Khan describes.

[Austin Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

A profoundly irritating book. Khan has many good insights but I continually found myself asking, how do we know that these are indeed unique qualities to St. Paul's students? Are "elite" characteristics necessarily found at "elite" schools, because some of these characteristics, I argue, could be found elsewhere. A comparison school would've been helpful.

Nor did I enjoy his reliance on purely anecdotal evidence, especially from a sociological perspective. It feels as if he bases a lot of his arguments on one to two students. Just having numbers of who is at the school, who goes to what college, what do they do after, would have been supremely helpful! And then there's other times where his own identity-a Paulie himself-is severely lacking. While he doesn't pretend to be a neutral observer as a teacher at a school he attended, it feels that his own experiences are completely disregarded at times when, given his goal is to track the **changes of a new elite**, would be extremely helpful for continuity/change-sake.

I also want to finish by saying some of the scenes are uncomfortable because it feels that Khan adopts a somewhat smug view of teenagers. It feels like he sometimes provokes them or uses unnecessarily harsh language to describe them.

Having read some of other Khan's work (and having taken a class with him for half a semester!), I know he could have written a better book. And generally, I find the thesis of this book (that the elite are now ostensibly egalitarian, relying on the ease of experience and democratic ideals rather than niche knowledge to justify their position in the hierarchy through hard work rather than breeding) very fascinating. But some of the methodological and rhetorical moves in this felt somewhat jarring.

[The American Conservative]

'Despite its narrow focus, Privilege is essential reading for understanding today’s elites. Not since Christopher Lasch’s Revolt of the Elites has the meritocracy been so effectively skewered. To be sure, Khan’s thesis—that the system is rigged in favor of the children of the rich—can be overstated.

Privilege never mentions that the most obvious reason that St. Paul’s graduates are still getting into Harvard, namely, that St. Paul’s, which accepts less than 20 percent of applicants, only admits those students likely to get into the top colleges in the first place. Nonetheless, as Khan shows, money does buy success, even in the meritocracy.'

Read the full review, "Top of the Class," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting and critical read of the private education that the top 1% (and their pity diversity recruits) get. I’m astonished to see some of the top reviews on this page be so critical of this book while not addressing any of the theoretical frameworks of this book.

This book is not simply about the “superior” education that these elites get and/or who should get that superior education. Rather, it’s an analysis of what the elite class is in the first place (formerly exclusivity, now a type of omnivore consumption of all taste) and how cultural capital gets passed down a la Bourdieu and embodied a la Butler. Khan argues that Saint Paul’s doesn’t just provide their kids with a good education, but it rather immerses them in ways of living and approaching the world.

I think that people who haven’t experienced this type of world may not understand just how spot on this book is. Some quick pointers:

- The constant focus on hard work and how much these kids deserve their success due to their hard work has arisen out of a new movement toward individual exceptionalism after the 1960s movement. (I feel like I needed more to substantiate this point: Khan argues that as minoritized populations fought for their recognition based on their individual merits rather than their class/racial/group membership, that led to the rise of individualism that would eventually undermine the greater legal protections they achieved. I need a bit more — is it the following Reaganism that shone the spotlight on the individual? I feel like these movements were, on the contrary, pretty horizontal in their leadership structures and rather intersectional.) This new focus on individualism helped obscure (or at least allow the elite to pretend to not see) the class differences between the elites and everyone else. The most pertinent example of this is how children who came from well off elite backgrounds were more comfortable having close relationships with school staff than lower and middle class children because to these children of the elite, they could just pretend they were equals, while the lower and middle class children had to confront the cognitive dissonance of coming from the same backgrounds as the staff while being served by them.

- Not that this is particularly novel, but the boarding school creates ways for each kid to feel special and talented and thus deserving of their success, and this success can’t be attributed to the fact that these kids only “work hard”. With so many resources, each kid can “excel” at some club or extracurricular commitment. Not only that, the Saint Paul’s kids expect to be exceptional. They’re given these overarching humanities focused education but don’t actually learn anything: they just know what key words to throw around to sound smart. A particularly funny example was when two seniors asked Khan to set up a seminar on morality featuring Spinoza and other philosophers. Believing them to be the philosophically advanced students that their advisors claimed they were, Khan set up an intense curriculum that started with an overview of the Enlightenment, only to find out on the first day of class that the kids barely knew what the Enlightenment was and that the kids only brought up Spinoza’s name specifically because they’d heard it once before.

(A side note on that: the French grandes ecoles and the Ivy League fosters this exact environment. These kids are most definitely not smarter than anyone. I actually have never heard such stupider thoughts that someone thought deserved to be vocalized in my life. Case in point: in a music humanities class, someone asked the teacher if Beethoven’s 5th symphony was inspired by his bowel movements. ???????? I love connecting medicine/health to other fields as much as the next person, but that was too much.)

- To be an elite is to embody the traits of the elite, which is this unaffected ease with regards to any social/cultural situation, whether “high brow” or “low brow.” It’s this very practiced manner of acting like you always belong (an attitude that takes time to assume). This kind of perfectly explains the difference between these elite boarding schools and say, a magnet public school. I cannot say that the quality of education differs dramatically, but what differs is that the boarding school kids come out with a sort of savoir faire. I think back to my undergrad days when I thought going to a French school (which I later found out was made for the French/francophone elites) would just involve me doing all the readings. I found that no matter how much French I spoke (I was fluent) or how friendly I tried to be, I could not connect with the other kids—I didn’t get how they could so casually flaunt their wealth or go on weekend trips to Paris or host extravagant soirées. Anyway, now I know the problem wasn’t me. It’s not my fault I didn’t grow up in the 16th arrondissement of Paris or attend a French lycee. I guess I did come out of this experience learning a bit of that ease, which softened my transition to the Ivy League, which wasn’t much better.

- Not a summary but more of a thought: I think I would have died if I were put into one of these schools as a teenager. I cannot imagine being stuck with the same 150 people and, being a girl, being ranked in popularity based on my sexual experience. And on top of that, doing all these crazy rituals and essentially learning how to be pretentious while pretending I was a woman of the world.

I think we should abolish boarding schools. We have enough rich people saying dumb stuff, we don’t need more of them who not only say dumb stuff but also think they’re better for it.

[Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking forward to reading this because I attended this school, albeit a lifetime ago, and continue to be involved as a volunteer. However, I found it somewhat repetitive without being earth shattering. Most of the author's observations, particularly about how students overvalue the abilities of other students, rang true, but the overall conclusions just didn't seem that interesting.

[Flora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Privilege gets at a lot of important and interesting issues without being dense, jargon-y, or extremely academic. A quick read that you can feel smart while reading.

[Kaylie McClelland · Rating 3 out of 5]

#schoolbookforschool but actually quite interesting!!! dark academia but irl and behind the scenes

would not read for fun

[Lizzie]

Recommended by Dan for at least the second time at dinner tonight.