Learning Privilege

About this book

How can teachers bridge the gap between their commitments to social justice and their day-to-day practice? This is the question that author Adam Howard asked as he began teaching at an elite private school. Unfamiliar with the educational landscape of privilege and abundance, he began exploring the questions he had as a teacher on the lessons affluent students are taught in schooling about their place in the world, their relationships with others, and how they see themselves. Grounded in an extensive ethnographic account of a six-year study on affluent schooling, Learning Privilege examines the concept of privilege itself and the cultural and social processes in schooling that reinforce and regenerate privilege. Howard explores what educators, students, and families at elite schools value most in education and how these values guide ways of knowing and doing that both create high standards for their educational programs and reinforce privilege as a collective identity. This book breaks new ground in studies of social class and education by illustrating the ways that affluent students construct their own privilege-not, fundamentally, as what they have, but, rather, as who they are.--