Education and Elitism

Challenges and Opportunities

Conrad Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000377316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education and Elitism discusses polemical debates around privilege, private schools, elitist universities, equal access to education and underlying notions of fairness. The overarching question that runs through the book is about the future of education worldwide: how can schools and universities tread the tightrope between access and quality?

This book investigates the philosophical positions that characterize elitism and anti-elitism to establish three types: meritocratic, plutocratic and cultural. These types of elitism (and their counter-positions) are used as reference points throughout the book's analysis of successive educational themes. The conclusion leads to suggestions that bridge the worlds of elitism and egalitarianism worldwide. The book covers critical questions related to the sociology and philosophy of education with particular focus on contemporary disruptors to education such as the COVID-19 pandemic and protest movements for social justice.

With an attempt to offer readers an objective overview, this book will be an excellent compendium for students, academics, and researchers of the sociology of education, education policy and comparative education. It will also be of interest toschool leaders, university provosts and professionals working in curriculum design.

Part I

The historical background

Chapter 1

Introduction to education and elitism

Zach and Anthony

The sound of the cock crowing is a strangled, painful call. The sky is a mottled grey, a smoky whisper of the powerful heat that will pound down on the earth in the next 30 minutes. Zach gets to his feet quickly and scrubs his lean body with a bucket of water fetched from the well. For breakfast, a tapioca gruel. He slings his school satchel containing an exercise book over his back and makes his way out of the compound on to the red earth of the path he will follow for seven kilometres to get to school. His shoes are too small by now, scuffed and marked with holes, but his gait is quick and lively. The sun begins to reach out its rosy fingers beyond the palm fronds up into the vast expanse and the earth heats up quickly. Zach lives in Burkina Faso, he is 13 years old. Millions of children like him walk to school every day and they are the lucky ones, for roughly a quarter of a billion children like Zach still do not attend school at all. For them, each day is dedicated to sweeping, washing, ploughing the earth or, if living in the sprawling cities, making ends meet by any means possible, including scouring rubbish heaps for sustenance. Going to school is a risk in many parts of the country: extremist groups have threatened those who attend school with terrible punishments including death.

Two hours later, Zach arrives at his school. He rushes to the classroom where 80 children wait patiently for their teacher, Mama Estelle. When she arrives, they all stand up and greet her in unison: “good morning Mrs Estelle”. “Good morning children”, their teacher chirps. Zach is squeezed between his classmates on a bench. He pulls out his pen and copies the date off the board.

Around the same time, Anthony’s android phone wakes him up to his favourite song. He stretches lazily in the warmth of his eiderdown, slowly gets out of bed and makes his way to a hot shower. He shampoos his hair peacefully and lathers his body with sweetly scented shower gel. He packs his MacBook in his bag and goes downstairs to breakfast, a buffet of exotic fruits including papaya flown to Switzerland from a farm not far from Zach’s compound, scrambled eggs and bacon, and freshly baked pastries. Anthony, who is 13, washes this down with a cup of delicious hot chocolate. A portion of the 150,000 Swiss francs per annum school fees paid by his father, a Russian oil merchant, is dedicated to an award-winning menu devised by a French chef who used to hold a Michelin star. Classes are held in a chalet a few minutes from the dining hall. As Anthony walks to class he gazes at the spectacular mountain range in the distance and takes the opportunity to send a selfie of himself to his cousin, who is at an expensive independent school in London.

When he gets to his classroom, the teacher, Angie, is playing some soft pop music in the background. She smiles warmly at her class of 15 students and asks them all to sit comfortably, to close their eyes. She turns off the music and asks them to slowly breathe in with their noses, out with their mouths, in with their noses, out with their mouths. “Concentrate on each sound you can hear, concentrate on what you are feeling right here and now. When you are ready, come back”. The children slowly open their eyes and when everyone is ready, Angie asks them to get into pairs and come up with “headlines” on what they learnt yesterday.

A divided world

We are living through a period of history where the division between rich and poor has never been greater (Picketty, 2013). The world’s nine richest billionaires own more combined wealth than the four billion poorest people on the planet (Jacobs, 2017). The situation is not merely one of wealth inequality but more specifically, as Picketty has shown, one where the return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth. In other words, individuals and groups owning major assets are becoming richer and richer. As this happens, the gap between capital wealth, that is to say asset ownership, and wealth gained through income, increases. This situation, which resembles that of the 1700s, is causing a dramatic gulf between the extremely rich and the increasingly pauperised middle and working classes throughout the world.

Access to opportunities, fair and open rules of the game, and basic principles of equal opportunity are waning every day as the world becomes more divided, favouring inherited wealth, those who have the means to trade stocks, to take risks and enjoy yield. Those wishing to become wealthy from a zero base, by climbing up the social ladder through education, hard work and performance, stand less of a chance than they did in the interwar period or just after the Second World War, which were periods of comparative economic growth. On average, Generation Z and probably their children too will earn less than their parents and will find it more difficult to access wealth than their parents ever did.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this gulf, leaving many further behind while pushing many further ahead.

As this situation of widening financial inequality becomes more and more exacerbated, the world of the financial elite becomes more and more difficult to enter, starting with education: elite private schools are becoming less accessible while top-ranking universities are more and more expensive and difficult to enter.

It is true that there are opportunities to break out of this gridlock: some of the most expensive US colleges offer full scholarships. In fact, Harvard has made a sustained effort over recent years to diversify its student body ethnically and socioeconomically to the point where some might argue that it is more difficult to get in with privileged credentials than without (Harvard, 2020), whereas 2020 statistics showed that, for the first time, “more than 69% of undergraduate offers to study at Oxford University have been made to pupils attending state schools” (Oxford, 2020). However, what appears as accelerated access that will bring students to new and transformative socioeconomic heights is still not the overall tendency. In general, the poorest students still struggle to receive the support they need to complete university without incurring huge debts (Mansfield, 2019; Kurzweil & Wyner, 2020). Often, aid recipients come from educated, middle-class backgrounds.

There is a sprinkling of countries where, according to the World Economic Forum, the inclusive development index shows that access to high-quality education and subsequent employment opportunities is still high (Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Finland, for example) (Brezis, 2018); in other words, the pathway of national education is a near guarantee to access to a decent living for the quasi-totality of the citizens of these countries. However, Nordic countries boasting high development indices are already wealthy and therefore benefit from a virtuous cycle: wealth begets wealth. Furthermore, these are the exceptions, not the rule.

In just about every other country in the world, the reality is a dual carriageway system with expensive private schooling leading to top-ranking (often private) universities and high-ranking jobs on the one hand while, on the other, an increasingly dysfunctional, saturated, and over-populated national education system leads to state universities with high attrition rates and, eventually, little opportunity of access to wealth.

As divisions deepen, increasingly heated and polarised debates are taking place about private schools in the UK, universities in South Africa and top-tier colleges in the United States. Those promoting access criticise the selective ivory tower: some public figures are pulling the alarm bell on what they consider to be unfair privilege. For example, in the UK, the Labour Party has made polemical statements about banning private schools, scandals have erupted over corruption and privileged access to top-tier colleges in the United States, and in a number of countries, notably South Africa, students are up in arms about the decolonising of university curricula and leadership. These idealistic voices singing social justice wish to see a flattened playing field.

On the other side of the fence, pragmatists and scholars bemoan a coarsening and dumbing down of public discussion, pointing out that populism and irresponsible short-sightedness might destroy some of the most precious and fragile cultural assets belonging to humanity—the vanguards of sacred principles such as quality, meritocracy and intellectual freedom. As tends to happen in heated debate, neither position is totally free of self-interest, ideology, over-generalisation of the opposing field’s position and general hyperbole.

This study aims to investigate the theme of education and elitism with as much objectivity as possible, always evoking the extremes, always pointing out their biases and assumptions but also seeking common ground and solutions.

What is elitism?

At the broadest level, elitism refers to the sociological practice whereby a group considers itself and/or is considered by others as separate from the mainstream and, in some way, superior.

This notion can be traced back to numerous societal structures such as aristocracy, oligarchy, meritocracy, plutocracy and countless variations of social hierarchy that are listed in this chapter’s lexical field of elitism.

The etymology of elite is the Latin éligere, to elect, which is at the root of the word eligible. The Collins English Dictionary defines the word elite as “the most powerful, rich, gifted or educated members of a group”, whereas elitism is “the belief that society should be governed” by such a group (Butterfield, 2003, p. 533).

Differences between “elitism” and “elite”

Technically speaking, “elite” merely describes the group considered to be superior to others. “Elitist” or “elitism”, on the other hand, suggest a social programme that aims to uphold an elite or venerates the notion of the elite. One might describe a social configuration as elite without being elitist.

The term “elite” is fairly strong and suggests an ideological positioning either for or against the notion: it is unlikely that someone describing the “best” test scores or top performers in a domain will describe that group as “elite” without critical or supportive undertones.

In 2010, the academic James Joyner attempted to differentiate between elite and elitist by suggesting, in a blog entitled “Elites and Elitists: One Can Be an Elite and Not Be Elitist and Vice Versa”, that the former is “a group or class of persons or a member of such a group or class, enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status”, whereas the latter is “[t]he belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources”. In other words, “the elite” is a select, often ruling class of individuals, whereas “elitism” is the belief that certain individuals or groups deserve higher ranking than others. Trying to dissociate the two is not altogether straightforward as is made clear by Joyner when he goes on to state:

I’m situationally elitist. I don’t believe in aristocracy or inherited status, nor do I believe that those lucky enough to be born smarter or even those who have become more wealthy through dint of their own achievement are better than those less fortunate. But I do think that people with superior intellect and achievement ought to, say, sit on the Supreme Court or occupy the vice presidency.

(Joyner, 2010)

From a strictly egalitarianist viewpoint, as soon as one starts to describe groups as “elite”, one is in an elitist mode of thinking. Social and educational discourses centred on equity and equality are unlikely to use the term because it is loaded.

Pro-elitism

Given the nature of elitism as a sociological construct and the fact that it can be considered as anti-egalitarian and therefore politically incorrect, it is not altogether ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I: The historical background
• PART II: Today’s global context
• PART III: Solutions
• Index