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 and how different it is at Weston and how high the level of competition is and how much stress and worry they have about getting into a good college and, more or less, the same complaints of any teenager in a challenging academic program. Weston is portrayed as the best of the best, the number one school in the United States. It is a highly competitive academic environment with outstanding facilities that offer students the opportunity to pursue and excel at their interests in the arts, sports, debating and social service, as well as in the core academic program. It is expensive ($50,000 a year) and a little over 30 years ago became co-ed. Maybe 15 or 20 years ago it began to recognize that it had a responsibility to the community to offer places to students from neighbourhoods where an education at a school like Weston used to be inconceivable. It has an enormous endowment fund and can offer some kind of financial aid to more than 30 percent of the student body and full tuition and all other expenses to 5 percent. Students come to Weston from everywhere in the U.S., from urban ghettos to the poor rural areas of the South and Midwest, a remarkable change for a school like this. The core of the student body though, 70 percent, is made up of children from wealthy families who can afford the fees. Over the years, this has not changed. What has changed is that there is more cultural and religious diversity than when the school was founded in the 19th century.

I was fascinated by how repetitive the words of the students became and by how much space their words finally occupied in the book. Gaztambide-Fernández spent two years visiting the school and talking to students in many different situations, from the lunchroom to formal interviews. Through this he concluded that the students learn to become elite and come to understand their eliteness through their education at Weston, and that the school determines the kind of bonds that link the students to it forever. These students, though, know who they are and where they come from. Some may feel guilty about having wealth and come to feel that they have earned it only after completing their gruelling academic tenure at Weston, but they know they are elite upper-class children before they set foot on the school’s idyllic rural campus. The bonds, too, are ties of friendship formed between the students in the context of a shared experience, coming through adolescence together and reaching young adulthood in the crucible of an intensive and competitive educational situation. These are the friendships students hold to their hearts and the ones they will revisit throughout their lives. The byproduct is a sense of identification with Weston and a sense of loyalty to the school that provided the context for their experience. After graduation they may see the school as no big deal—they have mastered it, after all. What is important are the emotional ties to friends and the sense of moving on.

The school, for all it has to offer, is rife with the prejudices of the broader culture, such as racism, sexism and homophobia. When asked by a group of girls whether he would send his daughter to Weston, Gaztambide-Fernández had to say no: “I wouldn’t want my daughter to deal with the pressures of being a girl in such an enclosed environment.” What followed was a long discussion by these girls about their experience as young women at a co-ed school like Weston. For the most part they talked about having to look good, about having to be not aggressive in discussions, about having to play down their intelligence, about how many of their peers lying around the playing field in bikinis were hoping to attract husbands and become trophy wives, and about how the boys would not tolerate discussions of feminism in class. For me, it was a validation of all the discourse I have listened to and participated in for the past 30 years about the advantages of single-sex education for women. The girls in an all-female environment such as The Bishop Strachan School in Toronto, an elite boarding and day school established in 1867, where I have taught for many years, do not feel coerced to hold back and can achieve to the maximum of their potential. The only time they get goofy is when boys from a neighbouring school visit the campus for one reason or another.

Imagine being a Weston parent and paying $50,000 a year thinking you are buying the finest education in the United States, only to find your daughter has been worrying about her desirability as a female and the quality of her social life. Even though the environment at the school is driven by competition, with the goal of winning academic prizes and getting into the best colleges, a certain number of girls seem to deliberately underachieve. For some, the only desired future is a domestic one in a rich man’s home. At Bishop Strachan, although girls might dream of a similar situation in life, at least they are not impeded in their development by having to perform in a secondary role while coming of age and meeting the challenges of being in school. As for the boys at Weston, they sound like Neanderthals when talking about women, still ranking them by how many beers they would have to consume in order to have sex with a particular girl based on her looks alone. The sexist ideas of these elite young men are no different than those of their fathers before them.

In the end, as a parent and an educator, what I learned from this book is that a school like Weston would not be one I would choose for my children. I learned that the Caucasian students of a certain socioeconomic group view themselves as elite and as entitled to what that can provide with regards to college admissions and career choices and opportunities. These are difficult times we live in, and being wealthy and well educated is no guarantee of a successful and productive life. These are things the students seemed not to consider in their over-blown estimates of their future roles as leaders in American society. I didn’t really learn much about Weston, about the way it works, about the specifics of who is admitted and the nature of the programs it offers, and about the ways decisions are made from the administration’s point of view. The author took the students’ words at face value and interpreted them through his lens as an outsider. More and deeper interpretation would have been helpful. Instead, we are left with a bunch of mostly rich kids accepting their own reality as members of the elite and seeing their experience at Weston as the challenge that earned them this credential.