Chile is ranked high on the OECD’s scale of income equality, the Gini coefficient. In 2022, they scored a 0.4 out of 1 (OECD 2022) with the upper classes and established middle classes comprising about 25% of the country’s population (Espinoza et al., 2013). These structures of inequality began in the colonial period when land ownership equated to high social status (Solimano & Zapata-Román, 2024). The neoliberal economic policies implemented under Pinochet’s rule have maintained these structures through persistent income gaps and provisions of social services (Solimano & Zapata-Román, 2024). Today, Chilean society is still starkly divided between the haves and have nots.
The Croft School in Santiago, Chile was founded in 1928 by a person, who was born in Chile but had British roots. After attending Cambridge University, he returned to Chile to found a school that could prepare Chilean students to attend British Universities. The founder integrated Chilean students into the school and began to incorporate local curriculums. In 1971, the school became co-ed, but did not become accredited as a British school until 2017. Regardless, the school has maintained a consistent air of prestige and a majority population of European descended students. The school has a highly selective admissions process along with extremely high tuition fees to create barriers that exclude lower-income students.
When going through the data on the Croft school, we found that many students alluded to their school as a site of reproduction of the inequality seen throughout Chile’s history. When asked how they define social class, one student replied that “here in Chile it’s like if you have money or you have little money” (Student 1). Authors Solimano and Zapata-Román explain how so much concentration of money within the elite class might be more of an issue than income inequality within Chile because when money gets passed down through a family, it often reproduces the same societal roles for a family over and over (2024). The Croft School is a place of extremely concentrated wealth where most students come from the same background that leads them to similar positions in society after schooling.
Pierre Bourdieu’s work on social class can help us understand how the Croft School has become such a bubble from the outside world in Chile. The school can be interpreted as a field of power, wherein students from the same social class are all competing for access to resources and recognition. Within this bubble, Bourdieu (1996) explains that “this selective confinement produces a very homogeneous group whose homogeneity is further increased through the mutual socialization brought about by continued, prolonged contact” (p. 75). One Croft Alumni described how “we’re used to seeing the same people or same backgrounds” and they “have a lot of friends right now at university who wouldn’t have been able to go to my school, whom when I talk to them about certain things, you realize that you’re living very different lives.” This exemplifies the divide between the inside of Croft and the outside world, as students don’t have much exposure between the two. Bourdieu describes how this division functions within total institutions such as Croft putting this as asking students to “to ignore what they do not know and to be satisfied with what they do know” (p. 90). This manifested in the interview data as student’s not having much interaction with other social class groups through things such as volunteer work.
The culture of the Croft School also lends itself to the outward discrimination of people deemed as different. One alumnus explained that their gay friend had a hard time in school because the school culture doesn’t “accept people being different, so it’s hard to be different in that environment.” Many students also described how they felt ostracized if they pushed back against the norms of the school. Bourdieu posits this as an integral part of the maintenance of elite spaces. Thus, students depend on their attendance at Croft to bring them status and therefore must adhere to the structures of class put in place by the school. Despite the huge problems with this, it was somewhat nice to hear that most of the students were very aware of the social hierarchy around them. Perhaps this acknowledgement on the part of students is a start to societal reform for equality within Croft and Chile on a larger scale.
Bourdieu, P. (1996). The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford University Press
Espinoza, V., Barozet, E., & Méndez, M. (2013). Estratificación y movilidad social bajo un modelo neoliberal: El caso de Chile. Lavboratorio, 25, 169–191.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (n.d.). Income inequality. OECD. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/income-inequality.html?oecdcontrol-8027380c62-var3=2022
Solimano, A., & Zapata-Román, G. (2024). Chilean Economic Development under Neoliberalism: Structural Transformation, High Inequality and Environmental Fragility. Elements in Development Economics. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009477352
