Class Warfare: Exploring Mechanisms of Produced Privilege via Elite U.S. Secondary Schools Inside the Press of the Global Economy

• In Event: Intersections of National and Transnational Class Formations, Postcoloniality, and Globalization in Elite Schools: Project Updates

Abstract

1. Objectives or purposes

Affirming the notion that privileged class position must now be “won” at both the individual and collective level, rather than constituting the “manner to which one is born” (with the exception perhaps, of the top one percent of the population in the US context), in my paper I track and theorize the intensified preparation for, and application to, particular kinds of postsecondary destinations as is now taking place in elite secondary schools, one that reflects a substantially altered set of postsecondary destinations from those typical of students in comparable schools of the past, where Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other Ivies dominated the list. Although the media have taken note of such “application frenzy” around postsecondary destinations, there is little scholarly work that tracks and theorizes this frenzy as a distinctly located class process, one that represents intensified “class work” and a new form of “class warfare” as class “winners” and “losers” become ever more apparent given the press of the global economy.

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
With the US as context, I explore a specifically located and largely unacknowledged re-working of class as the press of the global becomes paramount, while simultaneously focusing on the mechanisms through which observed macro level phenomena are produced and reproduced at the lived level on a daily basis, whether by explicit design/work or by virtue of what Bourdieu refers to as “habitus”—“a system of lasting and transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks”(Wacquant, quoting Bourdieu, 1992: 18).

3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
I critically interrogated and synthesized extant research in three key areas: the New Economy and globalized capitalism; educational stratification; and qualitative research and multi-sited ethnography.

4. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Data sources are based on two years of ethnographic research in a NAIS elite co-educational private school..

5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
What is most stunning, perhaps, is that in spite of the massification of the US system of education during the twentieth century, differences by class have persisted at largely consistent levels, a phenomenon in evidence in a wide variety of first wave industrialized nations. Campbell, Hombo and Mazzeo (2000), for example, suggest persistent relative class differences in achievement related outcomes, while Hout, Raftery and Bell (1993) indicate that class differences in attainment have remained relatively constant over the course of the twentieth century. This paper discusses re-workings of class in relation to the pressures of globalization.

6. Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
Taking seriously the notion that the production of class (as well as class structure more broadly) must be studied and theorized in relation to differentially located class actors, this paper pries open critical discussion with regard to the explicit “work” involved in maintaining advantage under massively shifting global conditions.

Author

• Lois Weis, University at Buffalo - SUNY