Prepping for Privilege

Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández’s The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School is essentially a book of people talking. It is not like Studs Terkel’s Working, or Jean Stein’s Edie: American Girl, or Jeffrey Potter’s To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock. In this book, the author is present and there is descriptive, analytical and observational writing throughout, but about one third of the book is the students at Weston School (not its real name), an elite boarding school in New England, talking about their experience. They are high school students talking to an adult outsider. Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, the outsider in question, teaches at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto and was a doctoral student at Harvard University when doing his research.

What the students at Weston have to say is mostly how difficult the work is and how smart they were in middle school...