Throughout this research process of the Croft school, it had not posed any major challenges until the task of finding outside sources to support our findings was presented to us. Being responsible for writing the literature review, I had to find some extra sources on top of what my peers already found, and it proved to be quite challenging. My group’s main focal point of our research is to talk about the bubbles that exist within Croft, but also about Croft being a larger bubble of their own. This was a similar theme when trying to find outside sources to help strengthen our findings. Looking for information about elite schools in Chile seemed to be nonexistent, as if no one had popped the bubble of researching Chilean elite schools.
When trying to find outside sources, I first wanted to look for articles that spoke specifically about elite schools in Chile. This seemed to be wishful thinking, as no useful resources surfaced through these searches. I tried several other times, adding and removing key words like “private” and “South America” to see if I could have any resources turned up about elite schools in other South American countries. This still resulted in results that did not fulfill what I was looking for. During class I remember hearing that Sebastián Madrid would be a potential strong researcher to look at. Upon looking up Madrid, there were several different articles that Madrid had written that showed up, with only one of them being applicable to researching elites in Chile.
The first piece of work by Madrid that I found to be very useful was,The formation of ruling class men: Private schooling, class and gender relations in contemporary Chile. Published in 2013 as the thesis submitted for his Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. While a lengthy paper, this work provided a strong foundation of how private schooling in Chile puts men in positions of power and how gender relations have seen a shift since neo-liberalism took over.
After interviewing students who have gone through elite private schooling in Chile, Madrid studies the ruling class and how it produces hegemonic masculinity within society. This is important work, especially in how this work directly relates to Chileans educated in elite spaces now holding powerful positions in their home country. Results from this study show that there exists ruling hegemony in Chilean society and it is produced and emphasized through elite private schools (Madrid, 2013). There is an important distinction within this work that is laid out where men who come from an elite private schooling are above men who do not have this background, regardless of the work they are doing following their education. Lastly, Madrid talks about women in these elite school settings, who still struggle with issues of discrimination due to cultural ideals that have existed for generations, where “the mother is the mother” (Madrid, 2013, p. 262), telling us that women still struggle to find themselves in positions of power, though these opportunities have grown, following their elite private schooling in comparison to their male counterparts.
This work by Madrid offers another insight into how elite schools help to put their students in positions of power following the completion of their education. Madrid’s work has helped to strengthen my group’s findings about the Croft school, but his work also contributes to a very small world of literature about elite private schooling in Chile.
The Untouchables: Social Closures in Elite Chilean Schools
The Untouchables: Social Closures in Elite Chilean Schools
Elite schooling in Chile is quite exclusive and rarely studied. In part of my work for our group research project I was tasked with finding literature supporting our ideas of a “bubble within a bubble” in Croft.
Through my research I found an article titled, “’The Untouchables’: Elite Schools, Privileges, and New Scenarios” by Josefa Barrera, Alejandra Falabella, and Tomás Ilabaca. This paper draws attention to the educational experiences of the elite in Chile, where little research currently exists. Elite schooling in Chile plays a pivotal role in preserving elite status among students as well as “social closure.” In our research we used the term “bubbles,” which relates to these specific groups’ students at Croft associate with but how Croft itself is one big group that seems to be untouched by those not at Croft.
These social closures the authors mention in their work come from the locations of these elite institutions. All the elite institutions in Chile are located in the metropolitan areas of the country. The locations of these schools create an interesting juxtaposition where they are close to some of the most impoverished households in the country but not accessible to anyone who does not come from an elite family.
Chile shows some of the highest rates of segregation in the world, with students from the wealthiest families in the country accounting for 8% of enrollment in their education system (Barrera et al.), where the parents of these students are contributing significant amounts of money to these schools on top of paying full tuition. This lines up with Croft, where there is no financial aid given to any student, and therefore, all students must be able to pay for tuition. Croft specifically is creating this bubble, or social closure, where only those who are able to afford to be in these spaces are allowed to be there. This paper supports the themes my group and I pulled from interviews from Croft students on how exclusive this school is and the difficulty in finding literature that supports our narrative.
The authors acknowledge the difficulty in finding literature about elite Chilean schools, explaining this by saying it’s “taboo” in Chilean culture to study the elites. I wonder if this feeling comes from being scared of the elites and what would happen if researchers uncovered any issues that exist within elite Chilean society. Chile is an incredibly unique country where elites, especially those who are associated with Croft, miss the dictatorship under Pinochet, as elite individuals were heavily advantaged under his reign.
After reading this article, the authors only solidified that these bubbles exist in the context of elite schooling in Chile, and that there is little research that looks into this. There is a reproduction of elitism that happens in these schools, where only those who can afford being in these spaces or those who have elite connections are able to succeed. This schooling opportunity allows students to enter the Chilean economy with well-paying jobs and connections to politicians, advancing them in society far greater than their non-elite educated peers. Those non-elites who are unable to break into these bubbles are so heavily disadvantaged in comparison to these elite individuals, creating incredible amounts of capital gaps.
Croft Manifesto: 100 Years of Useful and Trustworthy Students
I wanted to focus on the message that Croft puts out into the world, especially through their own school website. I was initially intrigued to write about this and to follow up on a previous blog post written in 2016 from student Elizabeth Noyes. I feel as though, as it has been just over six years to see what has changed, if anything, and whether or not I agree with the school’s website based on my research.
The school has posted its own manifesto on their website, talking about the improvements they wish to make as the school begins to approach its 100-year anniversary. I use this to compare it to ideas Elizabeth touched on in their work and how it relates to my findings. When the school was founded, its slogan, which remains to this day is, “We want to form young people who will be useful to the country and are trustworthy”. Immediately, we get the sense that Croft is educating students who will be useful and can be trusted in Chile. This is interesting considering the political history of Chile, as this slogan has existed through dictatorship and now democracy. I also find the “useful to the country” statement to be interesting as well as Croft is a British school where classes are taught in English. With the goal of Croft wanting to produce students who will be directly influencing the economy and political agenda of Chile, I am reminded of some ideas raised by Pierre Bourdieu. In The State Nobility, Bourdieu mentions the idea of circulation of capital. Croft is specifically using its name to give their students the best opportunity to build this institutionalized capital on top of embodied and objectified capital into positions of greater fields of power. I feel this ties nicely into Bourdieu’s discussion about mechanical and organic solidarity, and students while in schooling are navigating mechanical solidarity and work towards organic solidarity as they enter the workforce.
I also found the six points brought up in this manifesto to be quite interesting. I won’t go into them all but will pick out two that I feel most important to speak about. Essentially before I go into these two points, the school is aiming to evolve with the times, and doing that while being happy and creating students who follow the beliefs of Croft.
The first component I want to highlight from this manifesto is ” Rounded, Broad, Holistic”. The blurb along with these three words mentions how they want their students to be well rounded through academics, athletics, arts, and service. They believe that students who perform well in their extracurriculars will be performing well in their academics. To pull a quote from this blurb they say that ” a great performance on the Rugby field can directly help a pupil do well in the Maths Class”. I found this to be interesting as Elizabeth never noted an emphasis the school places on their extracurricular activities like this manifesto has done.
The second point I want to briefly talk about is “What do we remember as we grow older? The teacher that changed the trajectory of our lives.” The setting of Croft can only be so good if their faculty is not up to the standard they wish. Croft believes that careful recruitment and training of teachers is essential in growing a strong teaching foundation. Several students throughout our research criticized the teachers at Croft, often stating that they were very old, strict, and ran their classroom like a dictatorship. I would be curious to see if this were still the case at Croft as they have goals to enhance their teaching programs, but it is interesting to note how proud they are of their teachers given student interviews have had a sub-optimal experience with at least one teacher.
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.
