Globally Elite

March 8, 2023

Discovering Social Divisions in Elite School Settings

While reading through the transcripts and listening to the recordings from students and alumni at the Croft School, a theme of social groups, or social divisions emerged. From early research, the Croft School is quite different from any other school I have learned about. I find that it’s interesting that the school is British, with its curriculum being taught in English within a Spanish speaking country. The school’s language of instruction being English creates a division compared to other students who are attending schools taught in Spanish.

Croft as I said earlier is quite unique in how the curriculum is taught, with students being taught in English, but it is also unique in the way that students that attend Croft are some of the wealthiest in Chile, exposing these students to only those who come from the same backgrounds. While going through the interviews, it first appeared to me that many of these students downplay how wealthy they actually are, but through learning about their family history, I could tell they came from very affluent families and families that have a strong history of strong education and generational wealth. While there are always a couple outliers who are incredibly wealthy to others, students who attend Croft live in the nicest parts of Santiago and rarely leave their neighborhoods. Through reading these interviews, students often talked about how their homes were in the nicest part of the city, which directly borders the poorest part of the city. Parents strongly discouraged their children from going into that part of the city, as they felt it was too dangerous for their children. I find it quite interesting how both ends of the economic spectrum in this city are directly next to each other, offering a really interesting juxtaposition.

We see an obvious financial division between those who attend Croft and those who don’t based on where they live in the city, but I also discovered potential divisions between the students. Two of the pillars for the Croft are Athletics and Arts. Many students participate in athletics while being students at Croft, but many are also involved in arts. After initial readings of the students interviewed from Croft showed that many students participated in the arts more than athletics. Following this, there have been initial findings that there may be a divide between students in arts and athletics, which does not surprise me. This is because during my time at Colby there has been a strong divide between students that play sports compared to those who do not. I’m not quite sure how this divide even came to be as this has been the norm for many years. While not all students brought this particular division up in conversation or negated that this division existed, two students felt that this was the case. While this may just be a unique scenario that the students interviewed were all heavily involved in the arts, it’s the information that I have to help move my research along about social divisions in this specific elite school setting.

It will be interesting to see what my group and I uncover as we dig deeper into the history of Croft and the students of past and present. In these preliminary findings, I was not surprised to uncover these divisions through reading and listening to interviews of Croft students. In the future, I look to build more on particular divisions, particularly uncovering why students feel there is a divide between athletes and non-athletes and why others feel that is not the case.