Full Description
Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances foregrounds the richly theoretical and empirically-based work of an international cast of scholars seeking to break out of the confines of the methodological nationalism that now governs so much of contemporary scholarship on schooling. Based on a 5-year extended global ethnography of elite schools in nine different countries—countries defined by colonial pasts linked to England—the contributors make a powerful case for the rethinking of elite schools and elite class formation theory in light of contemporary processes of globalization and transnational change.
Prestigious, high-status schools have long been seen as critical institutional vehicles directly contributing to the societal processes of elite selection and reproduction. This book asserts that much has changed and that these schools can no longer rest on their past laurels and accomplishments. Instead they must re-cast their heritages and tradition in order to navigate the new globally competitive educational field enabling them to succeed in a world in which the globalization of educational markets, the global ambitions and imaginations of school youth, and the emergence of new powerful players peddling entrepreneurial models of curriculum and education, have placed contemporary schooling under tremendous pressure. This insightful and though-provoking volume provides a well-researched perspective on the nature of contemporary schooling in the globalizing era. This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalisation, Societies and Education.
Contents
Introduction: understanding the re-articulations of privilege over time and space 1. Staying ahead of the game: the globalising practices of elite schools 2. Doing class analysis in Singapore's elite education: unravelling the smokescreen of 'meritocratic talk' 3. The Argonauts of postcolonial modernity: elite Barbadian schools in globalising circumstances 4. Privileged girls: the place of femininity and femininity in place 5. Race-ing class ladies: lineages of privilege in an elite South African school 6. The Cyprus game: crossing the boundaries in a divided island 7. Reach for the stars: a constellational approach to ethnographies of elite schools 8. Old elite schools, history and the construction of a new imaginary 9. A comment on class productions in elite secondary schools in twenty-first-century global context
