Prep School Education Means Never Having to Feel Uneasy

Every so often I try to deconstruct my own education by reading the newest examination of the prep school experience.

The latest entry into this category is Shamus Rahman Khan's Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School (2001).

Khan is a Paulie, a former instructor, and now a sociologist. He's got some interesting insights here, although he occasionally muses too much, too academically.

What struck me was his observation that preppies learn to be physically at home in their surroundings, and carry this trait with them to all settings. Khan calls this state of being ease. He says that being at ease in all situations is one of the key benefits of this elite education. (Others are "supreme indifference" to amazing experiences and benefits as well as a talent for producing academic glibness without actually doing academic work....)

Khan discusses "ease" and "embodiment" at some length throughout the book. (Khan cites the work of Pierre Bourdieu as source of the embodiment concept, p. 196.) Here's the passage:

Embodiment is a fancy word for a simple idea: we carry our experiences with us. Our time in the world becomes imprinted on our bodies themselves . Time in elite space matters, and by definition elite spaces are ones that are exclusive. The importance to embodiment is that once social experiences become embodied, they begin to seem natural. It's just how your [sic] carry yourself. We all have to act in some way; your embodiment is yours. The particular form of embodiment of the new elite is ease. This ease is enormously wide-ranging. As they have integrated those who have been excluded, the elite have adapted many of the cultural markers they previously shunned. And so the new elite are at ease in a wide range of areas (pp 196-197).

Khan goes on to say "embodied ease is a physical manifestation" of "openness", that is elite's ability to play anywhere with anyone and blame others for not being able to do so (p. 197). He uses these concepts to deconstruct the current version of how preps are still elite and more hierarchical and exclusive, even while admitting a greater variety of people from a variety of background than ever before. Of course, as Khan explains, the main people who benefit from the experience are white males of the socioeconomic elite, because they are the ones for whom the experience has been shaped. The other kids find the societal gateway (drug) of prep school to be much more uneasy. And the gap between those can have these experiences and those who cannot afford them is growing.

How Khan explains embodiment is to the point. His equation of ease, embodiment, and privilege is powerful. His observations confirm many of my own experiences (as student and as teacher) in private schools. Not all. But how a student reassures a teacher that they belong in particular classroom can be how the kid inhabits that space.

Khan's thinking also connects to museum studies about school visitors and visitor experiences -- those who feel most comfortable in most museums are the people who grew up going to museums.... Hmmm, who would that be?

So, in this week as many of us go back to school, let us ask: For what purpose, and in what ways, are we shaping our students' environments? In what settings will they feel at ease? Where do you feel comfortable?

Me, I'm back to walking through halls with hundreds of teenagers flowing through them and feeling like it's normal...sorta.