Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School (Shamus Rahman Khan)
Publisher : Princeton University Press (October 14, 2012)
Language : English
Paperback : 248 pages
ISBN-10 : 0691156239
ISBN-13 : 978-0691156231
Borrowed from Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries
Feedback: 4/5
[Pages 2–3] My parents' story is a familiar one. Their ambitions drove them to the promise of America. Early in life I lived in New York's rural Allegany County. But seeking to make the most of American opportunities, my parents moved to the suburbs of Boston where the schools were better and the chances for me and my brother were greater. There was more to this move than just few schools. The Pontiac that was standard in the driveways of rural America was replaced by a European luxury car. The trips to visit family in Ireland and Pakistan were augmented by tours of Europe, South America, and Asia. My parents did what many immigrants do: they played cultural catch-up. I spent my Saturdays attending the New England Conservatory of Music. Public school education was abandoned for private academies. There was no more time for my religious education. We became cosmopolitan.
For all these changes, my father never lost some of the cultural marks of a rural Pakistani villager, and many in Boston did not let him forget his roots. He was happiest working with his hands, whether doing surgery or toiling in the earth. As he spent his free time sculpting the garden of our home into a place that would soon be put on garden tours, he was mistaken for a hired hand by visitors. During a visit to our home, one of my father's colleagues exclaimed, "Where are your books!?" Never in my life have I seen my father read a novel; his favorite music is still from the Indian movies of his childhood or the songs that greeted him when he arrived in Detroit in the early 1970s. He would not know Bach from Schoenberg. My father's reply to this cultural scolding by a New England blue blood was prescient: "Someday, my kids can have all the books they want." My parents were justifiably proud of what they had achieved, and the cultural tastes they would never develop they would instill in their children. We ate at fine restaurants. At one of these restaurants I saw my father, raised a Muslim, take his first sip of wine. The snobbery that always stung me—waiters handing me or my brother a wine list instead of my parents, who were clearly paying for the meal—seemed not to bother them. Compared to their achievements, these slights were trivial.
[Pages 14–16] Instead of entitlement, I have found that St. Paul's increasingly cultivates privilege. Whereas elites of the past were entitled—building their worlds around the "right" breeding, connections, and culture—new elites develop privilege: a sense of self and a mode of interaction that advantage them. The old entitled elites constituted a class that worked to construct moats and walls around the resources that advantaged them. The new elite think of themselves as far more individualized, supposing that their position is a product of what they have done. They deemphasize refined tastes and "who you know" and instead highlight how you act in and approach the world. This is a very particular approach to being an elite, a fascinating combination of contemporary cultural mores and classic American values. The story that the new elite tell is built on America's deeply held belief that merit and hard work will pay off. And it also harnesses a twenty-first-century global outlook, absorbing and extracting value from anything and everything, always savvy to what's happening at the present moment. Part of the way in which institutions like St. Paul's and the Ivy League tell their story is to look less and less like an exclusive yacht club and more and more like a microcosm of our diverse social world—albeit a microcosm with very particular social rules. This book will take us into the world of St. Paul's School to draw out three lessons of privilege that students learn.
Lesson 1: Hierarchies Are Natural and They Can Be Treated Like Ladders, Not Ceilings
Students learn to emphasize hard work and talent when explaining their good fortune. This framing is reinforced by a commitment to an open society—for only in such a society can these qualities explain one's success. However, students also learn that the open society does not mean equality—far from it. A persistent lesson is the enduring, natural presence of hierarchy. Within the open society there are winners and losers. But unlike the past where these positions were ascribed through inheritance, today they are achieved. Hierarchies are not barriers that limit but ladders that allow for advancement. Learning to climb requires interacting with those above (and below) you in a very particular way: by creating intimacy without acting like you are an equal. This is a tricky interactive skill, pretending the hierarchy isn't there but all the while respecting it. Hierarchies are dangerous and unjustifiable when too fixed or present—when society is closed and work and talent don't matter. And so students learn a kind of interaction and sensibility where hierarchies are enabling rather than constraining—in short, where they are fair.
Lesson 2: Experience Matter
Students learn this through experience. Many St. Paul's students are from already privileged backgrounds, and it would not be unreasonable to think that they would have an easier time learning these lessons. Yet adjusting to life at the school is difficult for everyone. The students who act as if they already hold the keys to success are rejected as entitled. In learning their place at the school students rely not on their heritage but instead on experiences. There is a shift from the logic of the old elite—who you are—to that of the new elite—what you have done. Privilege is not something you are born with; it is something you learn to develop and cultivate.
Lesson 3: Privilege Means Being at Ease, No Matter What the Context
What students cultivate is a sense of how to carry themselves, and at its core this practice of privilege is ease: feeling comfortable in just about any social situation. In classrooms they are asked to think about both Beowulf and Jaws. Outside the classroom they listen to classical music and hip-hop. Rather than mobilizing what we might think of as "elite knowledge" to mark themselves as distinct—epic poetry, fine art and music, classical learning—the new elite learn these and everything else. Embracing the open society, they display a kind of radical egalitarianism in their tastes. Privilege is not an attempt to construct boundaries around knowledge and protect such knowledge as a resource. Instead, students display a kind of omnivorousness. Ironically, exclusivity marks the losers in the hierarchical, open society. From this perspective, inequality is explained not by the practices of the elite but instead by the character of the disadvantaged. Their limited (exclusive) knowledge, tastes, and dispositions mean they have not seized upon the fruits of our newly open world.
[Pages 29–30] As the long nineteenth century progressed, the young were considered dependent on their families and the institutions that trained them for longer and longer periods of time. The Victorians similarly expanded the period of childhood where boys were seen as more innocent and pure. Dependency and innocence went hand in hand; left alone they would quickly be corrupted. By the 1860s, the students at St. Paul's were the same age as most of the students at Harvard had been in the 1820s; its curriculum was much the same as Harvard's had been. The delayed adulthood provided advantaged children three periods of development: first in their homes with their families, second in a school like St. Paul's that protected their innocence through isolation, and finally in either a university or an apprenticeship where students were less isolated and left to care for themselves. The hope was that the first two stages of this development would protect young men as they entered the third. This structure also distinguished middle- and upper-class children from working and poor children, who typically went straight from the home into the workplace. The rich were provided with "greater" moral development in their extended childhoods; this development provided a mark of difference—the mark of a gentlemanly morality.
[Page 36] Today what is distinct among the elite is not their exclusivity but their ease within and broad acceptance of a more open world.
[Page 45] The ritual of taking one's seat and occupying it for a year underscores the importance of constructing, respecting, and maintaining a specific set of social relations—exactly those relations that provide St. Paul's students with their extraordinary advantages. Through their daily sitting in the Chapel and countless other formal and informal experiences at the school, students are taught that the world is a hierarchical place and that different people are placed in different spaces within this hierarchy. As students move up, it is not the hierarchy itself that changes; the seats in the Chapel are fixed. The order of things is literally carved into what seems a timeless building; an almost ancient interior of the space gives the appearance of permanence. The students move within this order, adapting themselves to its dictates and procedures.
[Page 50–51] Even could know everything about St. Paul's—from the Tuck Shop to secret tunnels, from what dorms were "cool" and what dorms weren't—but these details were mere bits of trivia in the minds of the older students. Real knowledge came only through experiencing the place. These students insisted that the only valuable knowledge was corporeal—inscribed on oneself by the experience of living at St. Paul's.
[Page 55] While students consistently employ the language of hard work, so do staff. The difference is that for students, this work got them somewhere; for the staff, like Joyce, the hard work gave them something: a sense of pride. Though both employ the codes of hard work, the meanings of those codes are quite different. For one, it is work hard, get ahead. For the other it is pride in a job well done and being part of a school that is one of the best in the world.
[Pages 62–63] The awkward position of staff members in the lives of St. Paul's students becomes even more interesting when you consider that a few of the students may actually have parents who are housekeepers, dishwashers, or office workers. About a third of St. Paul's students receive substantial scholarship, and the school makes a very conscious effort to recruit students from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. I assumed that these middle- and working-class students would have an easier time interacting with these overlooked members of the community, as their earlier lives would have been spent among the working and middle classes. I reasoned that wealthy students, by contrast, would be uncomfortable interacting with staff, as their privileged position would have prevented them from knowing what the lives of staff members were like. I was wrong.
It was actually the wealthy kids who "noticed" staff more frequently than did the middle-class kids; they were also more likely to build relationships with them. At first this observation struck me as improbable. I suspected that the students I spoke to were simply gregarious (perhaps because they were more comfortable at the school) and therefore more likely to strike up conversations with anyone. Yet as I pushed this idea I found that it was the wealthy students who worked much harder to argue with me about the importance of their relationships with staff members and the depth and shared quality of the connection. Wealthy students, it seemed, were intentionally developing the capacity to interact with those "below" them. The development is a useful and necessary tool within our democratized America; elite students will be required to interact with non-elites throughout their professional lives. And they will be held to account for these interactions. Learning to successfully negotiate them was an important skill to develop.
Non-wealthy students, by contrast, were much more concerned with developing a set of interactional tools that would aid them in navigating upward, through elite institutions and networks. Further, wealthy students could more comfortably recognize and interact with staff members, as their own status and position were clear. For the wealthy, already ensconced in their place, the staff's presence did not highlight the tensions inherent in the efforts to transition into the elite. For middle- and working-class students, the presence of the staff members brought into relief the distinction between their present lives at St. Paul's and their past lives at home. Non-wealthy students had to learn to manage the contradictions between their "exceptional" experience at the school and their former, "everyday" experience at a home that was very different from St. Paul's. For wealthy students, no such contradiction management was necessary. For middle-class kids, the staff were a daily reminder that the space at St. Paul's—with its opulent, wood-paneled rooms, its gorgeous buildings and sacred spaces, and its immaculately manicured grounds—was not where they came from or what they were used to. The staff were reminders of this contradiction, of the seeming foreignness of their presence; the staff made more difficult the essential task of displaying ease and knowledge of the place.
[Pages 65–66] Beneath the thrill of being at an elite institution, cloaked in all of its regalia. St. Paul's students consistently believe in a foundational ideal of the boarding school. Anyone can learn physics or calculus. You can take classes at any number of great institutions. You can study the classics in high schools across the nation and, if motivated—as these students all believe they are—on your own. Though there are curricular differences between elite schools like St. Paul's and other schools, it is not the content of what is learned in any one class that makes the St. Paul's difference. The true mark of the elite board school experience spills far beyond the classroom. In fact, in interviews with recent alumni many were startled by how little they had learned at St. Paul's. Yet in these interviews they praised what they had learned at the school. The difference was not that they learned more but rather that they learned differently.
This was often tied to the excellence of teachers and the strength of their peers.
[Page 67] As I talked with more and more current students and alumni about their relationships with their teachers at St. Paul's, I could not help but think of Freudian transference—about the ways in which students seemed to fall in love with their teachers, and how this deep sentiment made possible kinds of learning and development that would have been otherwise enormously unlikely.
[Page 76] Privilege, then, involves navigating through the Scylla and Charybdis of respect for hierarchy and intimacy within such relations that make them appear as if such a structural form did not exist. In learning to navigate these difficulties, students learn the importance of finding their place within the school and, as the years pass, advancing that place. Rather than think of the world as a space of equality, students learn to think of it as one of possibility; adopting the liberal frame, equality is not to be expected but a “fair shake” is. Where you end up is most often a product of what you have done—students feel they have “reached the higher levels of the hierarchy through their own merit.”
[Page 101] Students learned not to value elite knowledge or to savor (or hide behind) the things that distinguished them. Instead they learned to consume quite freely across cultural boundaries. They learned to absorb it all and to want to absorb it all. Grace learned to chat with me about both DMX and violin technique. Rather than construct boundaries using their wealth and particular knowledge, the students instead work in ways to suggest that the field is even. It's not the quality of the shirt on your back that matters; it's who is beneath that shirt.
[Pages 112–113] The content of many of these lessons is not just knowledge but also comfort. The examples of meals are particularly instructive. All high school students know how to eat a meal. Most students who come to St. Paul's know how to eat a formal meal. Yet they are unable to do so successfully in their first months at the school. Boys and girls buy new clothes, borrow from each other's wardrobes, get new haircuts. And still possession is not enough; owning a Savile Row shirt does not make the man. Practice is the key. And only with experience can you achieve ease, the true mark of the privilege that is essential to being an elite. Thus we have the great trick of ease: ease requires hard, systemic work, yet the result should be "natural" and effortless. Just as hierarchies were obscured in the last chapter, the hard work for privilege is obscured (naturalized through ease) in this one.
[Page 127] They also explained to new students that they should never knock on each other's door; they should always just walk in (rooms have no locks at St. Paul's). Though this might cause some embarrassment at times, it was seen as essential. The reason was simple: if someone knocked, it meant the person was a teacher. And if you were doing anything you shouldn't be, this would quickly alert you to who was on the other side of the door. This lesson was the hardest for most new students to learn.
[Pages 134–135] All of these examples point to the ways in which students struggle to belong at the school: how they look for spaces where they fit, how they work on one another to define what it means to fit, what they symbolically mark as important for fitting in, how they orient one another to become a Paulie. These rituals also reveal that students cannot fit in just anywhere. Rather, they must take their place within existing status systems. The rituals described above exemplify the myriad ways in which the systems of the school (and of elite life) are inscribed onto the bodies of students. New students learn that they are at the bottom of the status hierarchy. The learn to embody this position in part through the disciplining acts of hazing and corporeal control. To return to an earlier argument, as students embody this subordinate position, they learn to occupy the bottom rungs on the school's ladder of dense relations. Essential to the arc of one's time at St. Paul's is figuring out how to navigate the different rungs of the hierarchy, until you ascend to the top and successfully inscribe the subordinate position on others. The goal is for such navigation to become natural so that you can converse with janitors and CEOs alike, so that you can be an elite with ease, living a life of ascension.
[Pages 144–145] When I asked Eric about Katie's visits, he was not revealing. "We work well together. It's nice to find that. I don't work really well with lots of people. But we seem to have found a way to get more done together." Here and elsewhere it seems that Eric resists being judged by the same standards as other boys. He did not tell me that he liked Kate, as he clearly did, but could do nothing about it because other boys beat him out for her affections. And so he opted out of competing with other boys on the basis of Kate's sexual attraction to him. But Eric's "resistance" to a hierarchy that would not favor him does not look like Lynn's; in fact, it does not look like resistance at all. Eric simply chose not to compete on the terrain of athletic ability and attractiveness. Eric was a competent athlete and far from unattractive. But he was an excellent student and a hard worker. He played to these strengths. When I asked Eric about why he didn't hang out with or do the kinds of things some of the more "popular" kids did, he told me, "You know, Mr. Khan, when you have an Asian mom things are different. I mean, I better work hard or else! She'd kill me. She has always pushed me. And for a while that was it; now I push myself."
But I found Eric's diagnosis largely unsatisfactory. There were kids who did just as well as Eric who did not self-present as hardworking. Some very popular kids, in fact, spent as much time working as Eric did. But they didn't frame themselves to the community in this way, as Eric had. The difference was that in the school's stratification of excellence, Eric would be near the top; in the hierarchies of attractiveness, sexual prowess, or athletic ability he would be in the middle. So he simply opted out of competing on the dominant terrain of attractiveness and sexuality and opted into competing on the basis of his academic excellence. That Eric could compete on a different terrain required the existence of such a terrain, one that didn't exist for Lynn or Mary. And as the visits by a high-status girl like Kate indicated, doing so had the kinds of rewards that I never observed for a student like Lynn. This point should not be taken too strongly. It is not that boys have it so much easier or that their opting out is more effective. In fact the multiple stratification systems of boys are themselves stratified (which is to say that athletics and attractiveness are paramount among them). But the existence of other systems that boys can situate themselves in allows for a different form of resistance that is not as destructive or confrontational.
[RT: I might have the same kind of experience as Eric in school.]
[Page 150] In a world where distinctions between classes and peoples seems to be vanishing, the appearance of the elite becomes a crucial marker, an invisible sign of status. One of St. Paul's basic though unspoken purposes is to teach the new elite how to embody their privilege. Over and over life at St. Paul's offers a series of lessons that inscribe privilege on the bodies of each student; through corporeal acts of everyday life, students figure out how to manifest the natural ease that is the foundation of the new elite. As students achieve this ease, they further—often without any conscious awareness—the "trick" of privilege: obscuring the relations that allow for its realization. Teaching the ease of privilege—the naturalness of wealth and power—is thus a fundamental role of elite institution like St. Paul's.
[Page 152] This is not to say that the distinctions between social classes are disappearing; rather, the class divide is appearing; rather, the class divide is appearing differently. As pressures to open the elite have increased in the last fifty years, so have the cultural practices of the elite. Elites have incorporated some of the cultural attributes and tastes of those they have previously excluded. Yet this new practice—omnivorous consumption—is itself a symbolic marker. Omnivorous consumption develops within elites a sense of indifference, or an ease of position. They are comfortable almost anywhere. It is as if the new elite are saying. "Look! We are not some exclusive clubs. If anything, we are the most democratized of all groups. We are as comfortable with rap as opera. We can dine finely or at a truck stop. We accept all!" Such an attitude makes it appear that privilege is obtained through democratic practices, not aristocratic exclusion. But these practices, this omnivorousness, become their own mark of distinction. Following the classical sociologist Max Weber, I think of privilege as a "mark"—something that the privileged display to one another and to the disadvantaged. And through the display of these marks, the privileged seem to say, in response to the disadvantaged, "It is your own closed-mindedness, your own choices to not take advantage of this new open world, your own lack of interest that explain your position and not durable inequalities."
[Pages 157–158] Perhaps the point is not really to know anything. The advantage that St. Paul's instills in its students is not a hierarchy of knowledge. As we have seen, knowledge is no longer the exclusive domain of the elite. And these days, information flows so freely that to use it to exclude others is increasingly challenging. By contrast, the important decisions required for those who lead are not based on knowing more but instead are founded in habits of mind. St. Paul's teaches that everything can be accomplished through these habits, even while still in high school. What strikes me as presumptuous, even shocking, about this vision of the world is taken for granted by pretty much every teenager at St. Paul's.
Though I marveled at how impossible it seemed to teach students all these things, the school itself seems largely unconcerned about this. Indeed, St. Paul's approach seems closer to Plato's outline of education in Republic. Building upon his famous cave metaphor, Plato tells us, "Education isn't what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes. … The power to learn is present in everyone's soul … that sight is there but it isn't turned the right way." In short, education is not teaching students things they don't know. Rather, it is about teaching them how to think their way through the world (in Plato's terms, how to "turn toward the light"). These habits of mind are quite different from facts or learning "things". To ask students to develop habits of mind is to ask them not to know things about the world but instead how to relate to the world. In Plato's view, the knowledge is already in them: the trick is to find ways to release it.
What was the War of the Roses? When was the French Revolution? What were the major factors that precipitated it? Who was involved? What did the political organization of the Greek Republic look like? These are the questions that students, upon completing their training in the humanities division, cannot answer. These courses don't focus on the events of history or culture but use them to ask "bigger" and often more abstract questions: What is myth? Who is the other? To whom do we owe our obligations? The result of these two styles of learning is two very different approaches to the world. The former set of questions, which 0 students to memorize facts and tangible details, will be recognizable to anyone who had a more "traditional" education. The difficulty with these questions is that one can be wrong in answering them. The latter, by contrast, are the result of a more "progressive" pedagogical model that cultivates habits: these questions don't have a wrong answer. They reveal not knowledge but styles of knowing. Such questions are concerned not with the details but with the intangible realm of our world, with interpretation and point of view. Right and wrong do not apply. As we shall see, this intangible allows for a new form of exclusivity—privilege—that is not what one knows but how one knows. And such habits are what we taught at places like St. Paul's.
[Pages 160 – 162] Just as they believe they can contribute to the specific knowledge in a particular area, students also learn to consume from an enormous variety of sources. They learn to work and "interact" with art, literature, and history, from the popular to the scholarly, and have a huge range of materials at their disposal. For example, one of the major assignments in Humanities III is to compare Beowulf to Steven Spielberg's Jaws. Students are asked to think about the ways in which Beowulf is a monster that man must confront, just as Jaws is a monster that prowls the waters of humanity (and perhaps even our own internal waters). The goal is not to endow the students with a kind of highbrow elite knowledge. Rather, they are with felicity from the elite to the popular. They learn to be cultural egalitarians. The lesson to students is that you can talk about Jaws in the same way you can talk about Beowulf. Both become cultural resources to draw upon. And most important, the world is available to you—from high literature to horror films. There are no things that are "off limits"—limits are not structured by the relations of the world around you; they are in you. Students are not to stand above the mundane, perhaps lowbrow horror flick. Instead they are taught the importance of engaging with all aspects of culture, of treating the high and the low with respect and serious engagement. As our future elite, these students are taught not to create fences and moats but instead to relentlessly engage with the varied world around them.
The consequences of the St. Paul's philosophy can be seen all over campus, evident even in how students carry themselves. Students have the sense that they could do it. The world is a space to be navigated and negotiated, not a set of arrangements or a list of rules that are imposed upon you. The students are taught that they are special, and they begin to realize their specialness. This is a kind of self-fulfilling, prophecy—thinking everything is possible just might make it so. But there is a deeply social character to this self-fulfillment. The classical sociologist Emile Durkheim speaks of "acts of consecration" as the ways in which we tend to imbibe very small differences with tremendous importance and power. Though the "religion of liberalism" might consecrate those who are most able, it is in fact a particular social arrangement that has made those who are merely "able" into something sacred.
Think for a moment of someone famous. It would be difficult to explain that person's fame or specialness by his or her personal qualities. These qualities are rarely that different from those of others. Instead, we all work to consecrate such people, to make them almost sacred and to help make them into who they are. We make Madonna "Madonna" by consecrating her. To "consecrate something is to put it in contact with a source of religious energy," and such energy is the experience of being so special. Yet that which is consecrated is not inherently sacred.
In the present day just as much as in the past, we see society constantly creating sacred things out of ordinary ones. If it happens to fall in love with a man and if it thinks it has found in him the principal aspirations that move it, as well as the means of satisfying them, this man will be raised above the others and, as it were, deified. Opinion will invest him with a majesty exactly analogous to that protecting the gods. And the fact that it is society alone which is the author of these varieties of apotheosis, is evident since it frequently chances to consecrate men thus who have no right to it from their own merit.
As we have seen throughout our story, St. Paul's students believe that they are exceptional. They would take umbrage at Durkheim's notion that their mere able qualities can be elevated to the sacred or that meritorious talents are not internal qualities but social constructions. And yet in telling the story of how an institution trains elites, I am firmly telling a Durkheimian story of how elite culture works through the elevation of a small group not by their individual characters but by a social process of schooling. Students experience consecration each day on campus through the teachers that give themselves to the students. These privileged students are made into elites by the interactions that consecrate them, by the consistent, generous feedings they receive of their own capacity and promise.
The audacity of this system is shocking and ingenious. 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 latter used to explain their success.
[Page 183] Beowulf is not used to exclude but instead to emphasize how the world is available, knowable, and at your disposal. This facility in the world is the truly important orientation, not knowing things that others don't.
[Pages 190–192] The world around elites has transformed. Exclusionary practices are no longer viable or sustainable. Distinction has given way to equality. Omnivorousness is the strategy of being a new elite, and it is built upon an essential attitude toward to world: ease. Being an omnivore means not making distinctions: not having to, not wanting to, not needing to. It can even seem to be the most fundamental form of equality. Jaws and Beowulf are both cultural artifacts to be played with; they are equally worthy of our consideration. Though they are showered with remarkable opportunities, the elites at St. Paul's do not know more; they know differently. This different way of knowing is a mark possessed by an individual. The fact that some of us have this mark (and most of us don't) is not a product of inequality—we all have access to knowledge. But from the perspective of elites, their personal qualities and characters produce inequalities within the necessary hierarchies that define our human lives.
The view of the world that the students from St. Paul's come away with is one wherein the world is defined by its possibility, not its constraints. If we think of other ethnographic studies of schools—and for many, their own experience of school—the presence of rules, constraints, and punishments is paramount. These things, however, are almost completely absent from our story of St. Paul's. On campus, the world is presented as a kind of blank canvas, ready for students to seize. Thinking of the world as a space of possibility is consistent with a meritocratic frame: the world is yours; all that is required are hard work and talent. Students believe that they work extremely hard and they are exceptionally talented. While I would not characterize students as working hard—as they often really do not do their work—they are certainly busy. This busyness presents the appearance and feel of hard work. And yes, there is certainly a lot of talent at St. Paul's—though not of the meteoric variety that the students often believe about themselves and each other.
This vision of self and the world—both inculcated by the school and eagerly promoted by the students—has important ramifications. The attitude that the world is perpetually available—and that you are exceptionally capable—goes beyond the simple frame of meritocracy. The world and its innumerable possibilities is a space one can and should navigate with ease. As we have seen throughout our story, this ease is an essential Paulie posture, and it often manifests as an indifference to the remarkable opportunities granted them. These students see the extraordinary as everyday. Students can throw stones at a priceless sculpture. When thinking about a trip to the Met, the best answer they can give to whether or not it was enjoyable is "I guess." In their indifference, these students are, from their perspective, cultural egalitarians. They watch Jerry Springer, listen to hip-hop, go to the opera, and are equally comfortable dressed formally for seated meal and as "pimps" and "hos" at a school dance. They treat jumping on a plane to go to the Met Opera as an everyday affair, like walking to the local coffee shop to hear a new singer-songwriter.
If these newest members of the elite are cultural egalitarians, the natural question is, how is cultural hierarchy created and maintained? The standard story we have been told is that certain cultural markers are acquired and made exclusive by elites. Thus, we think of opera as high culture and polo as a sport of the rich; the rest of us assume that those items of elite life are out of our grasp. I have no reason to doubt this story. Yet the rather ingenious trick is that whatever inequality still remains in our world can be blamed on those at the bottom—those who are not cultural egalitarians. Their close-mindedness to the breadth of culture means they do not seize upon the fruits of our new, more equal world. The resulting image among the elite explains systematic inequality not as the product of conditions but instead as a product of people's doings. If the world is an open space of potential, why do some people fail? Because they don't seize the potential (available to all) within the world.
What St. Paul's is teaching is a style of learning that quickly becomes a style of living—with an emphasis on ways of relating and making connections rather than with a deep engagement with ideas and texts. It is no surprise, within this pedagogical model, that an indifference—not just toward Beowulf but toward much of life's opportunities—is the result. This ease of life is not just a mark of privilege. It is also a mark of protection. For if the elite truly embraced hard work, they could be outworked. Ease is both an obscure thing and hard for the rising classes to master. They must work hard to achieve, and it is nearly impossible for this hard work not to leave its mark on them. The advantaged have embraced the accoutrements of the open society with their omnivorousness. But through their marks of ease, they have found ways to limit advancement within such openness, protecting their positions.
[Page 194] 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 in inherent character of the individual that matters, not breeding, or skin color, or anything that smacks of an old-fashioned collectivity.
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