Elite Boarding Schools

This paper examines how Irish elite schools negotiate change and maintain their legitimacy in times of economic turmoil and rising social inequality. It argues that they have not bowed before the demands of democratisation or economic globalisation. Instead they continue to maintain a high level of social closure and control diversity rather than adapt to it. Moral character acts as a principle of distinction and legitimation as these schools pose as the moral vanguards of the nation, in a national context where the economic crisis is commonly blamed on ‘greed’ and moral corruption. Their discourse is based on the defence of a certain social and moral order, somehow at odds with the dominant neoliberal ideology, but consistent with a static view of society and an aristocratic conception of leadership, which their students internalise.

The number of International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) schools has increased rapidly in China in recent years. However, access to schools offering the IBDP remains restricted to a relatively elite minority of China’s population due to enrolment barriers for Chinese nationals and relatively high school fees. An implication is that students potentially remain in physical, cultural and socio-economic isolation from host communities. Within this context, this study explored how, and the extent to which, two core components of the IBDP – namely, the Learner Profile and Creativity, Action, Service – help foster inter-cultural understanding between students and other communities within Chinese society. To this end, in mid 2013 interview data were gathered from IBDP teachers, IBDP administrators, and IBDP students from five elite IBDP schools in Beijing and Shanghai. Findings revealed a perception that the Learner Profile could provide a strong theoretical appreciation of the norms and values of other cultures, while Creativity, Action, Service could break down physical divides by offering students an opportunity to interact with people of different cultures and socio-economic groups. Nevertheless, interviewees also noted tensions with the implementation of these components in the context of results-oriented elite IBDP schools in China.

This paper draws on fieldwork from the Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances multi-sited ethnographic project (funded,by the Australian Research Council)  and a reading of the websites of elite schools. This five year project, with a team of six researchers (Jane Kenway, Fazal Rizvi, Cameron McCarthy, Aaron Koh, Johannah Fahey and myself) is studying schools, founded at least 100 years ago and modelled on the British independent school, in Argentina, Australia, Barbados, Cyprus, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, South Africa, and the UK, some of them for girls only, some coeducational and others for boys only.

Taking a psychoanalytic perspective, and with particular reference to famous English ‘public’ (i.e. independent) schools, I argue that they are narcissistic institutions, grandiose in their claims and expressed opinions of themselves. This, I suggest, is not only a necessary and major part of their marketing strategies, but also a reflection of how they actually think of themselves. Focusing particularly on boys, I explore the ways in which they construct their own masculinities as 'the best of the best', echoing and reproducing the narcissism of the schools themselves.

Since the governing elites in Britain (and, indeed, in other countries) are often made up primarily of men educated at these schools, this gives rise to concern about what it means for the governance of societies, economies and cultures when the ruling economic, social and political elites - predominantly men - have developed the narcissistic character styles and versions of masculinity fostered by their schools.

RESUMEN: El presente artículo estudia los colegios reales de internos dentro del sistema educativo liberal decimonónico a partir de un análisis pormenorizado del Real Colegio de San Pablo de Valencia. Mediante el empleo exhaustivo de fuentes documentales conservadas en cinco archivos, se detalla el funcionamiento de este centro educativo para destacar el conflicto surgido a raíz de la tensión entre los intereses personales de Juan Bravo Murillo, que otorgó empleos de importancia a familiares, y las necesidades de una administración eficiente impulsada por Antonio Gil de Zárate. La lucha entre la corrupción política y los nuevos valores asociados al liberalismo en este caso se vinculó, además, a la problemática del modelo de enseñanza media defendida por el Estado: colegios de internos elitistas o institutos de bachillerato abiertos e inclusivos. Este conflicto se resolvió a favor del modelo de bachillerato único en establecimientos abiertos y, tras la Revolución Gloriosa, se suprimió el Real Colegio de San Pablo para terminar con las malas prácticas de su director.

The role of boarding schools in helping to overcome education disadvantage for First Australian young people has received increasing attention, and funding, from government, the media, and private sector investors in recent years. Notwithstanding policy approaches encouraging, and for some populations even mandating, that students leave home to attend boarding school, little research has sought to understand how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students experience ‘mainstream’ boarding school and what impact it has on later life outcomes for them, their families and communities.

It is well understood that a wide range of social factors, ranging from the macro-social to the individual, influence the health of populations generally, and Indigenous populations specifically (Saggers 2007, Anderson 2007).  Education attainment levels are recognised as one of the social determinants of Indigenous health (Dunbar 2007). By contrast, in education policy, scant regard is paid to the social factors that underpin education engagement and success for First Australian students in predominantly non Indigenous schools.

This thesis uses a narrative, multiple case study method to examine the experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australian boarding schools, and in their post school years. In all, seventy-four interviews were conducted, across every state and territory except Tasmania. These include interviews or focus group discussions with alumni of boarding schools (35); parents or community members (27); and school leaders or staff in boarding schools (12). Interview data were analysed to identify what participants sought to achieve through boarding school; what constrained or enabled positive outcomes; and what were the actual outcomes achieved by alumni in the short, medium and, in some cases, long terms.

This research presents the most comprehensive evidence to date on the lived experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people in Australian boarding schools. It establishes that as well as being determinants of health, racism, trauma, and social connectedness were also fundamentally important to education success for participants in this study. Data presented here indicate that when schools engaged authentically and proactively with these issues they assisted these young people to maximise the benefits they derived from education.

Findings challenge the narrow and exclusively empirical measures currently used to define education ‘success’. Whereas schools and scholarship providers focus on preparing students to fit into school systems, research findings indicate that more critical attention should be paid to the systems themselves.

Too little attention has been paid to the school institutions intended to educate and socialize the children of the upper classes. Greece has a significant history of private educational institutions. Yet their history and role within the educational system and society has been consistently neglected. The study of elite private education and its relationship with the social reproduction of the upper and middle classes in Greece has been even more neglected. Through a study of elite private secondary schools, following the theoretical model of Pierre Bourdieu, we explored the relationship that the middle and upper social strata of Greek society maintain with specific private schools. In order to determine the above, we conducted a quantitative field survey at 13 well-known private schools in Athens, using a questionnaire. In these schools we find considerable over-representation of the social categories that are placed at the summit of the social hierarchy. A basic argument of our study was that different sections of the middle and upper classes develop different educational strategies to ensure their social reproduction and to increase their privileges. These different strategies adopted by traditional and more recently emerging social classes are reflected in the differences among the elite private schools as a “field” and they distinguished the very top private schools from the less prestigious one. Also, we have found that sections of the Greek upper and middle class provide their offspring, through certain schools and activities, with an international capital which is a necessary condition for their future participation in international educational and professional markets. The study’s central research methodology included geometrical data analysis such as correspondence analysis.

This article brings studies on elite schools into conversation with studies on colonialism to show how elite status, as constituted through boarding school campuses, is implicated in colonialism. Using document and visual analysis of elite boarding school materials available online, this article reveals the pastoral coloniality of elite boarding school landscapes in Germany (Schule Schloss Salem), the United States (Phillips Academy Andover), and Canada (Appleby College). We argue that the pastoral design of these elite school landscapes, together with the schools' narratives about the character of their campuses, require and mobilize colonial logics of open, endless land for the purpose of constituting elite status as endless opportunity.

A cigányság oktatási és ebből következően munkaerő-piaci hátrányai olyan problémaként jelennek meg, amelynek orvosolására számos oktatáspolitikai kezdeményezés született. Habár a rendszerváltozás követően javult a cigányság oktatási helyzete, megjelentek a cigány fiatalok a felsőoktatásban is. A diploma megszerzése azonban sok esetben csak valamilyen ösztöndíjjal vagy egyéb támogatással sikerülhetett. A kezdetben nem etnikai alapú támogatásokat felváltották az etnikai alapú ösztöndíjak, létrejöttek a cigányság számára létrehozott tehetséggondozással foglalkozó kezdeményezések. A szakkollégiumi tehetséggondozás az egyik leghatékonyabb módszere (lehet) a felsőoktatásba bekerült fiatalok segítésének, hiszen ezek az intézmények holisztikus szemlélettel rendelkeznek. Nem csupán anyagi támogatást nyújtanak, hanem különböző programokkal, mentori, tutori foglalkozásokkal segítik a szakkollégiumokba felvételt nyert hallgatók iskolai sikerességét, valamit fontos értékközvetítő, identitáserősítő feladatokat is felvállalnak, mely értékátadás különös jelentőséggel bír az egyházi szakkollégiumok esetében. Mára az egyházi tehetséggondozás tehát etnikai színtéren is megjelent, létrejött a Keresztény Roma Szakkollégiumi Hálózat. Célunk annak bemutatása, hogy miben különböznek, illetve hasonlítanak az egyházi cigány és nem cigány szakkollégiumok, van-e valamilyen jellegzetessége a cigány fiatalok egyházi szakkollégiumi nevelésének és tanításának, milyen célzott tevékenységekkel, programokkal kívánják megvalósítani a cigány értelmiség kinevelését, a fiatalok felsőoktatási sikerességének előmozdítását.

This thesis uses the Swedish boarding school Lundsberg to write a global history of elite boarding schools and, more broadly, to reflect upon the transnationally interconnected nature of elites.The research draws on primary sources from Lundsberg, Sweden, but also from boarding schools in other parts of Europe, as well as in Africa, America, Asia, and Australia. The argument at the heart of this thesis is that from the beginning of the nineteenth century and onwards, there existed something that could be understood as a semi-autonomous global ‘field’, in the Bourdieusian sense of the term, of independent boarding schools. During the formation of this global field, English ‘public’ secondary boarding schools such as Winchester College, Eton College, and Rugby School, quickly emerged as an international gold standard for what an elite boarding school should look like. The ethos and educational ideology of the Victorian English public schools thus not only spread throughout the vast British Empire, but also left a lasting impact in countries such as France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. In competing over pupils and
prestige, these institutional incumbents have constantly been challenged by more ‘progressive’ or ‘modern’ alternatives that are generally based on ideas emanating from outside the British Isles. There have, in other words, always existed two strands within the global field of elite boarding schools: a ‘progressive’ one and a
‘conservative’ one, and there has never been any insurmountable barrier between them. I argue that since the second half of the twentieth century, a globally standardised ‘composite’ elite boarding school model has emerged. These composite boarding schools have integrated key elements from the progressive
New Education Movement, while at the same time having retained many of the symbols and rituals of the English public schools of the Victorian era as a veneer of elite distinction. Notwithstanding this process of globalisation, I argue that the rationale of the nation state in the formation of elites through education remains to be reckoned with. In other words, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, new ‘global’ elites continue to be constructed first and foremost at the national and local levels, and elite boarding schools continue to play an important role in that process.

Although there has been considerable interest in the Chilean education context in recent years, limited attention has been given to the specific educational experiences of social elites. As a starting point, this paper provides a systematic literature review of international and local research centered on the elites' school education. This review was based on relevant research published in the Web of Science, Scopus and Scielo databases between 2008 and 2018, as well as other documents and books identified as relevant to the subject. Overall, 104 texts were included in this review. The primary results suggest that there are critical mechanisms of (re)production of privilege and of social exclusion in the education of elites. Despite this closure, research demonstrates that small, yet significant, fissures have emerged. These have been triggered by globalization, the intensification of competition in educational markets, the reconfiguration of discourses about merit and privilege, and the demand for greater inclusion and equality. The analysis concludes that there is a pressing need to strengthen a research agenda in this domain regarding the Chilean experience to better inform educational policy-making.

The shape of the paper • Introducing the British 'public' school • Colonisation, empire and the nuancing of the form • Outline of narcissism • The elite school as a narcissistic institution • Identity production and narcissism • From elite schools to elite government -the narcissism of power elites Later theorists:

Zusammenfassung: Während Internatsgymnasien in Deutschland im öffentlichen Diskurs wiederholt als Stätten von Elitebildung thematisiert werden, ist bislang kaum etwas über die tatsächliche internatsschulische Sozialisation und ihre Bedeutung für die nachschulischen Biografie- und Berufsverläufe der Ehemaligen bekannt. Davon ausgehend werden Forschungsfragen entwickelt, um die biografische Bedeutung des Internatsbesuchs, die Selbstentwürfe und die Lebensverläufe von ehemaligen Internatsschülerinnen und -schülern zu untersuchen. Im Zuge dessen werden zudem Internatsgymnasien theoretisch-konzeptionell dimensioniert, theoretische Schlüsselkonzepte zur Untersuchung der Bildungs- und Berufsbiografien von ehemaligen Internatsgymnasiastinnen und -gymnasiasten dargestellt und heuristische Annahmen formuliert.

Abstract: While boarding schools in Germany are repetitively discussed as sites of elite education in public discourses, little is known about the actual boarding school socialisation, its significance for the post-school biography, and careers of former students, so far. Drawing on this desiderate research questions are developed to examine the biographical relevance of the boarding school attendance, the self-concepts and the trajectories of former boarding school students. In the course of this, boarding schools are dimensioned theoretically and conceptually as socialisation places. Furthermore, theoretical key concepts for the study of the educational and occupational biographies of former boarding school students are presented. Based on both, heuristical assumptions are posed.

Volunteer abroad programs are a burgeoning industry and rite of passage for secondary school students, particularly at elite independent schools, which aspire to produce global leaders. What is the role of racial bodies in making elite schools and subjects? Multicultural strangers (Ahmed, 2000) and humanitarian strangers are crucial to this process of becoming both behind and beyond the ivy-covered walls of southwestern Ontario’s elite schools.

I present two case studies to track how racial encounters consolidate a civilizing femininity that secures the moral distinction of elite status. The first considers multicultural strangers. I present declassified archival documents from three boys’ schools when they transitioned to co-education and increased international recruitment. The second case study follows humanitarian strangers. I track processes of “enchantment” (Cravatte and Chabloz, 2008; Mahrouse, 2011) during a school’s South Africa volunteer trip. This presentation uncovers the institutionalization of racial logic at elite schools through strangers.

This conference proceeding explains how a Waqf-run Islamic boarding school (exemplified by TAZAKKA Modern Islamic Boarding School, Batang, Central Java, Indonesia) can prevent Muslim community from educational gentrification caused by the mushrooming emergence of Muslim elite schools in Indonesia

This investigation examines the legacy of the Third Reich through the prism of education. After the collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945, the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France divided Germany into four zones of occupation and introduced a wide-ranging program of denazification. Former administrators, teachers and pupils of the Napolas, boarding schools for the Third Reich’s future elite, were among those affected by the purge. The Napolas had enjoyed an intimate relationship to Heinrich Himmler’s SS between 1936 and 1945, due in large part to the schools’ emphasis on racial purity and premilitary training. Yet Napola apologists responded to postwar prosecution by denying the schools’ role in Nazi plans for European domination. Their constructed memories rehabilitated the Napolas’ postwar image and successfully reintegrated alumni into West German society. The Napolas’ “postwar legend” has since become the defining characteristic of Napola alumni associations’ collective identities.

In this article, we use our experiences to demonstrate the limits of the “studying up” metaphor to capture the complexity of the dynamics involved in doing research on groups that occupy positions of power within social hierarchies. The article focuses on different facets of the research process, alternating between our individual narratives and a shared discussion of the significance of our experience for thinking about and doing research within the particular context of elite schools.

The production of young elites as caring national leaders and global citizens requires regulated racial encounters. At Canadian elite schools, these encounters are formulated as multicultural and humanitarian educational experiences. These carefully managed experiences obscure structural inequities and ongoing exploitation to help secure students’ sense of themselves as empowered and capable.

My paper follows the racial routes through which Canadian elite school girls – both white and of colour – use white femininity to secure ruling class status. This ruling class status requires and reproduces a Canadian brand of global citizenship that articulates through national narratives of innocence and moral excellence, particularly in relation to settler colonialism and peacekeeping. These racial routes to ruling class status recruit particular racial others to participate in liberal modernity through the practices and processes of global white supremacy and settler/colonialism, practices that aim to “assist” Black and Indigenous others “into modernity” (Razack, 2004, 2015).

I analyze ethnographic data using a critical race feminist framework to theorize the encounter between girls from an elite Canadian private school and the Zulu children in South African townships that they visited to teach. I discuss several of the techniques, such as enchantment, that the Canadian group deployed as effective self-making strategies that worked to conceal the deep colonial continuities of the encounter.

This paper answers three questions: (1) what is at stake for young elites in this humanitarian encounter?; (2) what is required in order for the humanitarian encounter to work?; and (3) what does this encounter do for young elites and elite Canadian private schools?

This is the story of how Canadian elite schools and students leverage gendered racial hierarchies to secure the material and symbolic advantages of ruling class status.

The preparation of this book are intended to supplement the rules of coaching and mentoring of students in institutions with a model Boarding School especially in Indonesia, which is expected to contribute ideas to the managers and executive institutions and provide insight to the public on the Boarding School. This book is also structured based on the knowledge and experience of the author as a nanny and parenting coaches in the Institute of Local government in Indonesia (IPDN).
In this book describes methods of construction and management of residential educational institution that many take the example in boarding institutions, service educational institutions and public educational institutions. The main points of this book consists of 5 chapters will discuss a fundamental, namely: Chapter 1 Concept Boarding School, especially in Indonesia; Chapter 2 Models and cultural institutions boarding; Chapter 3 Methods of coaching and mentoring learners; Chapter 4 Evaluation; and Chapter 5 Barriers and challenges boarding educational institutions.

This article focuses on the continuing impact of recuperative masculinity politics in the schooling of economically advantaged boys (elite and middle class); yet, it also indicates resistance to this politics. An understanding that the gender order is unstable and that variants of hegemonic masculinity continue to morph in the context of globalisation is also exemplified. Two case studies are analysed,

In this editorial, I reflect on what the authors show us about curricular unruliness at elite schools, in other words, educational experiences that emphasize a digressive approach in the classroom. How does an unruly approach to teaching young elites consolidate relations of rule, and does this approach offer possibilities for unsettling relations of rule at the site of elite schools?

This book takes us inside the complex lived experience of being a First Nations student in predominantly non-Indigenous schools in Australia. Built around the first-hand narratives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander alumni from across the nation, scholarly analysis is layered with personal accounts and reflections. The result is a wide ranging and longitudinal exploration of the enduring impact of years spent boarding which challenges narrow and exclusively empirical measures currently used to define ‘success’ in education. 
Used as instruments of repression and assimilation, boarding, or residential, schools have played a long and contentious role throughout the settler-colonial world. In Canada and North America, the full scale of human tragedy associated with residential schools is still being exposed. By contrast, in contemporary Australia, boarding schools are characterised as beacons of opportunity and hope; places of empowerment and, in the best, of cultural restitution.

In this work, young people interviewed over a span of seven years reflect, in real time, on the intended and unintended consequences boarding has had in their own lives. They relate expected and dramatically unexpected outcomes. They speak to the long-term benefits of education, and to the intergenerational reach of education policy.

This book assists practitioners and policy makers to critically review the structures, policies, and cultural assumptions embedded in the institutions in which they work, to the benefit of First Nations students and their families. It encourages new and collaborative approaches Indigenous education programs.

Zusammenfassung: Anliegen des Beitrags ist es, die biografieanalytischen Potenziale der Begriffe Identität und Habitus zu diskutieren und ihre Genese anhand der Biografien von ehemaligen Internatsschüler*innen nachzuvollziehen. Mit "privilege as identity formation" liegt überdies ein an die theoretischen Überlegungen anschlussfähiges Konzept vor, das nachvollzieht, wie sich Internatsschüler*innen mit sich und der Welt in Beziehung setzen und wie sie dies in der Schule lernen. Anschließend werden die Möglichkeiten einer Kombination der sozialwissenschaftlichen, interpretativen Verfahren der sozialwissenschaftlichen Prozessanalyse und der Dokumentarischen Methode, die sich in ihren methodologischen Bezügen auf den ersten Blick jeweils stärker auf nur einen der Begriffe beziehen, in Bezug auf ihren Beitrag zur Frage nach der Identitäts-und Habitusbildung herausgearbeitet. Anhand von qualitativen Interviewdaten werden erste Fluchtpunkte in Bezug auf die Identitäts-bzw. Habituskonstruktionen der Ehemaligen skizziert.

Identity and habitus
Perspectives of the Biography Analysis and the Documentary
Method on the biographies of German boarding school alumni

Abstract The aim of the article is to discuss the biographical analysis potential of the terms identity and habitus and to understand their genesis on the base of the biographies of former boarders. With "privilege as identity formation", there exists already a concept that can be connected to the theoretical considerations and which reconstructs how boarders relate to themselves and the world and how they learn this in school. Subsequently, the opportunities of a combination of two interpretive approaches, the Biography Analysis and the Documentary Method, which in their methodological references at first glance are more strongly related to only one of the terms, are elaborated and how they contribute to the question of the identity and habitus formation of the alumni. On the basis of qualitative interview data, first vanishing points in relation to the identity or habitus constructions of alumni are emphasized.

Good afternoon and thank you for having me here today. A couple of years ago I found myself caught up in a demonstration. Generally, I'm not much of a demonstrator and in this case, it was a Friday afternoon and I was keen to get home. It was a happy coincidence that this was a cause I believed in. I even found myself chanting with the crowd: 'always was, always will be Aboriginal land'. The protest had brought the CBD to a standstill. Many hundreds if not thousands of people were marching. We ended up at the corner of Swanston and Flinders Streets outside Melbourne's iconic Flinders Street station. There was a large circle at the centre of the intersection around which the crowd pressed. Lo and behold, in the middle of circle was a young woman, draped in an Aboriginal flag, arms raised in defiance, screaming invectives against the West Australian government which was threatening to close remote communities. She was someone I had interviewed in the course of my study into the experience of young Aboriginal and Islander students in the mainstream boarding schools. Hers was not one of the communities slated to be closed, but others close to her home were. When I interviewed her, she had described herself as being stuck in Melbourne. Not stuck in a bad way she told me, but stuck nevertheless. She had come to like city life and didn't want to go home. At that time, she had completed one semester of two different university degrees, but now she was working full-time in a cafe. As I watched her rage against the machine, I thought of how she'd described her choice not to return home. I took her protest to be an outpouring of love for her family and her country. I wondered if, when they watched the footage on social media, they would understand her advocacy. Whether they'd recognise the passion and appreciated the significance of her actions. I wondered if they would understand the sheer audacity of bringing the city to a standstill on a Friday evening. I wondered whether they would be impressed by both the force of her fury but also her ability to put it into words. I wondered whether any of this could have happened if she hadn't gone to boarding school. As I observed her from the sidelines, it was absolutely evident to me that she was at home in this city. And in her own skin. I wondered whether, for all her anger and her pain this was a moment in which she could reconcile the two hemispheres of her life. For a young woman from a

This paper examines the role re-location has played in shaping the status of elite and middle-class schools in and around London. A Bourdieusian lens is applied to understand the institutional trajectories of 51 schools which moved from central London out to the suburbs and beyond between the 1860s and 1970s. It is argued that this strategy served to maintain, reinforce and create institutional prestige within the ‘field’ of schools serving the upper and middle classes. These re-locations have had a lasting effect on London’s school system, pushing key institutions of elite social reproduction outwards and away from the city centre. In discussing the motivations for re-location, Bourdieu’s (1996) theory of field and elite formation is used with specific reference to urban change, thus developing a Bourdieusian-historical approach to understanding the geography of social reproduction (Thiem, 2009). The focus on London also sets these re-locations in the context of broader socio-spatial shifts within the British upper and middle classes, in which new social formations were emerging, with an aristocratic-financial elite concentrated in the south-east of England (Anderson, 1964; Rubinstein, 1977). Re-location formed part of a broader process of urban and socio-economic transformation which created a powerful educational infrastructure for the upper and middle classes in and around London.

Too little attention has been paid to the school institutions intended to educate and socialize the children of the upper classes. Greece has a significant history of private educational institutions. Yet their history and role within the educational system and society has been consistently neglected. The study of elite private education and its relationship with the social reproduction of the upper and middle classes in Greece has been even more neglected. Through a study of elite private secondary schools, following the theoretical model of Pierre Bourdieu, we explored the relationship that the middle and upper social strata of Greek society maintain with specific private schools. In order to determine the above, we conducted a quantitative field survey at 13 well-known private schools in Athens, using a questionnaire. In these schools we find considerable over-representation of the social categories that are placed at the summit of the social hierarchy. A basic argument of our study was that different sections of the middle and upper classes develop different educational strategies to ensure their social reproduction and to increase their privileges. These different strategies adopted by traditional and more recently emerging social classes are reflected in the differences among the elite private schools as a ‘field’ and they distinguished the very top private schools from the less prestigious one. Also, we have found that sections of the Greek upper and middle class provide their offspring, through certain schools and activities, with an international capital which is a necessary condition for their future participation in international educational and professional markets. The study’s central research methodology included geometrical data analysis such as correspondence analysis.

This short blog post describes how elite private schools in England are taking advantage of rising rents on historic property ownership in London. In one case this includes increased rents for university students going straight into the pocket of an elite school. At a time of cuts to school funding within the state sector, private school endowments are cementing the deep inequalities in school spending. I argue that these inequalities pre-date neo-liberalism and reveal the deep structural violence of the British state which must be challenged politically.

This paper demonstrates what is at stake in the elite school volunteer abroad encounter and argues that these programs should be eliminated. I draw from my ethnographic study of a group of students from an elite Canadian secondary girls’ school who travelled to South Africa for the purpose of volunteering. I reveal the techniques that students, both white and of colour, use to fashion an elite subject position for themselves through the body of the humanitarian stranger. The fantasy of the elite school humanitarian encounter is facilitated through techniques that include opposition/ intensification, authenticity/proximity, and enchantment. These strategies converge with the Western imperial formulation of Africa. What I theorize as the civilizing femininity of this volunteer abroad encounter is consolidated through a relation of care that uses the bodies of Black children as routes to moral distinction. This economy of care articulates through larger circuits of Canadian mythologies of goodness, global citizenship, humanitarianism, and global racial capitalism. Even though the volunteer abroad trip I studied was framed in the language of “social justice,” “sustainability,” and “partnership,” I found that the encounter remained deeply rooted in and replicative of these logics. I propose an alternative that positions Canadian youth as action researchers of their lived experiences.

This paper follows the elite school encounters that led to the institutionalization of volunteer abroad programs. I examine the historical elite school encounters to tell the story of the chronological move from the Grand Tour to the volunteer abroad encounter. Each historical encounter reveals a specific desire at the heart of the formation of elite status.

This chronology shows a shift from an emphasis on the desire to see, that is, to observe the lives of foreign others, to an emphasis on the desire to do, that is, to improve the lives of those considered disadvantaged. While doing does not replace seeing, and the scopic impulse is a persistent one, I show that there is a shift in the dominant desire that is at the heart of these encounters. In this transition from seeing to doing, the elite subject becomes a humanitarian and comes to know herself as assisting others into modern life, a mark of superiority that is at the core of what it means to be white.

I consider six elite school encounters that contributed in different ways to the racial project of producing the elite subject: the Grand Tour from the 17th to the 19th centuries, Inuit scholarship students at Lakefield College School in 1928–1929, war guest programs in the mid-20th century, exchange initiatives, gap year programs, and volunteer abroad initiatives. My approach is to follow continuities and shifts that tell the story of the move from seeing to doing.

The production of young elites as caring national leaders and global citizens requires regulated racial encounters. At Canadian elite schools, these encounters are formulated as multicultural and humanitarian educational experiences. These carefully managed experiences obscure structural inequities and ongoing exploitation to help secure students’ sense of themselves as empowered and capable.

My paper follows the racial routes through which Canadian elite school girls – both white and of colour – use white femininity to secure ruling class status. This ruling class status requires and reproduces a Canadian brand of global citizenship that articulates through national narratives of innocence and moral excellence, particularly in relation to settler colonialism and peacekeeping. These racial routes to ruling class status recruit particular racial others to participate in liberal modernity through the practices and processes of global white supremacy and settler/colonialism, practices that aim to “assist” Black and Indigenous others “into modernity” (Razack, 2004, 2015).

I analyze ethnographic data using a critical race feminist framework to theorize the encounter between girls from an elite Canadian private school and the Zulu children in South African townships that they visited to teach. I discuss several of the techniques, such as enchantment, that the Canadian group deployed as effective self-making strategies that worked to conceal the deep colonial continuities of the encounter.

This paper answers three questions: (1) what is at stake for young elites in this humanitarian encounter?; (2) what is required in order for the humanitarian encounter to work?; and (3) what does this encounter do for young elites and elite Canadian private schools?

This is the story of how Canadian elite schools and students leverage gendered racial hierarchies to secure the material and symbolic advantages of ruling class status.

Sociologist Colin Bell pointed out that sociology “can be easily seen as thoroughly implicated in the power structure of society” (1978, p. 25). One way in which this implication is expressed is the way that ethical concerns have become institutionalized and regimented. This article puts forward the argument that a true study of elites must be, by default, un/ethical because the taken-for-granted assumptions and common sense that shape ethical decisions protect those with power, including academics themselves. I make such a “radically un/ethical” move by discussing the story of a story I was not supposed to tell about a secret ritual at an elite boarding school. I invite the reader to become implicated in the story to suggest that the ethical responsibility to reveal the hidden dynamics of power and that sustain elites override my ethical responsibilities to the institution.