Elite Private Schools & Privilege
Missionaries or mercenaries?
Missionaries or mercenaries? How teachers in elite private schools embrace privilege
George Variyan (Monash University, Australia)
The notion of unearned privilege is both contested and self-evident.
That some of us are more privileged than others, not on account of our efforts but simply due to our birth, upbringing, skin colour and sex, is impossible to deny. Though how many individuals actually recognise that truth in themselves, reflect on it, and appreciate how it has shaped their lives?
Not many, for sure.
But privilege is not something that just happens to us by luck and the circumstances of our birth. Privilege is institutionalised.
And nowhere is privilege more institutionalised than in independent, private, elite schools.
And herein emerges a contradiction, because few individuals become teachers in order to perpetuate privilege. Most teachers recognise inequality when they see it. They recognise how gender, sex, sexuality, ethnicity, class and race are elements that intersect not only to create identity but to create power effects and that power is not neutral.
In which case, how do teachers with this liberal open-mindedness and who find themselves working in schools where unearned privilege is perpetuated, experience, negotiate and reconcile this tension?
That question lies at the heart of this important study:
‘[This study] provides crucial evidence for understanding how privilege functions, how teachers are not simply co-opted or constrained. Instead, this article brings into view the agency of teachers who embrace privilege in spite of thorny questions around educational inequality what private elite schools cannot avoid.’ (p. 1)
It has long been recognised, not only by sociologists and educationalists but also politicians and indeed the ‘masses’, that elite private schools perpetuate inequality.
These (mostly Western) schools, many of which now have outposts around the world but especially Asia, are undoubtedly implicated in the social reproduction of elite groups and consequently, social injustice.
But knowing and recognising something is unfair is not the same as changing it.
The desire for personal and familial betterment, material wealth, social status, and an enhanced and more ontologically secure identity, are factors all core to this discussion.
Simply put, elite private schools continue to exist because individuals want them to exist and are prepared to pay heavily for the advantages they bestow.
This Study
The setting for this particular examination of elite private education is Australia. The study focuses on three schools which are ‘typologically, geographically, historically, scholastically and demographically elite’. In short, old and wealthy private schools in Australia that have been modelled on the historic English public-school character and system.
All three schools, located in two capital cities in Australia, are boys-only schools with boarding cohorts as well as students attending on a day basis.
“The field work was conducted within the High School campuses of these schools, with teachers who taught boys in the Middle Years and/or Senior Years of schooling, roughly 12 years to 18 years old…the 32 participating teachers were all classroom teachers, with some holding leadership roles.” (p.3)
Gendered Challenges
Gender dynamics operate in a multitude of ways but are invariably readily discernible in education.
And no less so in this study.
While each school appeared to have a balance of male and female teachers, the ‘notable exception is management…which remained skewed at all three sites in terms of gender’. Over 40 years ago, Connell at al were making the point that:
‘having women teachers in nearly equal number is undercut by the fact the principles, deputies and subject heads are mostly men.’
Some things never change, or change inexorably slowly.
The study also exposes how women and men teachers differently explain and legitimate their position in the school. The women teachers tended to use the discourse of ‘luck’ (“I guess I’ve just been very lucky”) while the men teachers never suggested that luck played a factor in them getting a job in the school – they put it down to their agency and ability.
And then there is the masculine culture embedded in the very school climate, exemplified in these accounts:
“For example, Rick (teacher and co-curriculum leader) from Miller College talked about the culture of the school and how it was ‘very competitive, very (.) very (.) a big culture of people talking behind each other’s backs’ and how it was ‘mateship thing’ that supported him at times. This inflection of collegiality – ‘mateship’ – which is historical theme in the Australian political imaginary, bound up in a masculine if not macho nationalism, presents quite differently to female teachers on the outside of such benevolent circles. As Joanna (Miller College) remarked, ‘There’s a group of male staff that train together…work out, cycle, do various things together (.) which (.) comes across as a club…we [female teachers] all (.) see it’. (p. 10)
Payoffs for Teachers
Think of all the obvious advantages of working in an elite private school and you probably have them wrapped up in this quote from the article:
“It is crucial to point out that it is not just the material aspects of pay but also because ‘the classroom is just that more civilised and easy and they’re brighter and (.) the academic standard’s a lot higher (Brad, St Wootens) which helps Brad to run rough-shod over his ‘Lefty’ inclinations and the ‘slight tinge of guilt that the morally right thing to do is work with those that need us more’…
If we consider these payoffs in addition to the financial benefits, then even ‘Left’ political dispositions will clearly not destabilise teachers’ commitments to their schools….It is this ‘dialectical interplay’ (Kemmis et al, 2014, 193) of agency and circumstance that produces a stability and resistance against the animus of guilt sitting at the horizon of teachers’ everyday work.” (p. 12)
Missionaries or Mercenaries?
If you are a teacher or leader reading this and you work in a private elite school, including an international school, then much of what you’ve read will be familiar.
You likely became a teacher because you ‘wanted to put something back’ into society. Instead, you ended up adding to the privileges of an already privileged group.
Yes, I know, there will be much you and your school do to try and rebalance that advantage – not least by offering places to the less advantaged and doing ‘outreach work’. But you and I both know that this is just a sop to the conscience of the school, a way of handling your own ‘animus of guilt’.
So where does that leave you? Are you a missionary or a mercenary? Let the author answer that question for you.
“On the face of things, it would seem that teachers are ‘missionaries to the rich’ (Cookson Jr and Persell 1985, 85) as much as they are mercenaries for hire.
Yet it is clearly not a case of allegiances simply aligning to pay-checks or alternatively that financial and ancillary benefits do not enter into the teachers’ calculus. Instead, this article foregrounds how teachers accommodate institutional life and thrive in spite of questions of guilt, morality and ethics.
It is through this dialectic that the political (and self) technologies of teachers ecologically mesh with their institutions, and through which ‘practice takes shape for them in a way that is inextricable from their participation in it’ (Kemmis et al. 2014, 61, original emphasis).(p.12)
We all make compromises, we all make accommodations, and we all end up negotiating.
Though perhaps the greatest accommodation and one for which humans are especially skilled, is the way we compartmentalise our beliefs with our lifestyle.
Article summary by Dr Stephen Whitehead
reference
George Variyan (2019) Missionaries or mercenaries? How teachers in elite private schools embrace privilege, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 40:8
link
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01425692.2019.1659753