Chilean Education System

Homogeneity – What the data was telling us all along

Thomas Barry / Globally Elite / Chile, Chilean Education System, Elite, elite schools, elite social class, habitus, homogeneity, homogenous, Inequality, Pierre Bourdieu, social class /

November 17, 2016

When I wrote my last blog post, my research group had yet to conduct an interview with our assigned student at the Croft School. At that point, we wanted to focus our research on extracurricular activities.

However, after analyzing the transcripts for our 3 interviews, I noticed a common theme running through the data: homogeneity. To support my analysis of the Croft School in this post, I include relevant questions and responses from our interviews in bold below.

According to the Croft School student we interviewed, most students at the school come from similar backgrounds. Croft School students often come from families that encourage and expect them to attend university. Since this school does not offer financial aid or scholarships, all students at this school come from families that can afford the school’s tuition—in other words, from a high socioeconomic class.

Interviewer: So does the Croft offer scholarships to students who can’t pay the full tuition?

Student: No.

This doesn't exist at the Chilean School! — **This doesn’t exist at the Croft School!**

Since Chile is so economically and socially inequitable, it is not surprising that Croft School students like our interviewee live in areas concentrated with upper-class families, and rarely interact with lower class people.

I: No scholarships? Oh. And then where you live in Santiago, did you grow up exposed to people of different social classes, or do most people who live in the area are from the same social class?

S: All from a similar social class.

I: How often do you interact with people who are not in your group?

S: Not often.

igualdad — **Yup, that looks pretty unequal to me!**

Since a majority of students attending the Croft School come from similar backgrounds/social classes, it appears they also share a habitus. Pierre Bourdieu defines habitus as a system of embodied dispositions that organize the way individuals perceive and react to the world around them. These mental habits, schemes of perception, classification, appreciation, feelings, and actions are shaped by social interactions and personal histories. As a result, different groups (such as a social class) share a habitus.

While students appear to share a habitus before they enter the Croft School, the headmaster’s message and our interviews indicate that the school also teaches an institutional habitus. Institutional habitus is the impact an organization, such as the education system, has on an individual’s behavior. This organization typically reflects the values of a particular cultural group or social class. In this case, the Croft School reflects upper class values.

The Croft School’s curriculum is organized to prepare students for university, and reinforces the expectation that they will attend. The school encourages students to pursue certain high-paying careers (including engineering, law, medicine, economics, and architecture) after attending university. Through an “all-rounder”, holistic education, students are taught the school’s values—the spirit of service, good manners, and fair play. While not explicitly a Croft School value, our research also indicates that the school encourages competition.

According to our interviewee, the Croft way of thinking is synonymous with the Croft values.

I: Many of the Croft thinking is based on competition with others. Like because one of the key elements of school is like sports, sports you have competition. Like I want to get to the first team, things like that. Ummm that’s reflected on like almost every aspect of the Croft, like in aspects where there should be no competition

I: Yes. And that is like the main aspect of the Croft kind of thinking, competition.

Our interviewee also told us that students are rewarded for sharing the same views as their teachers.

I: … There is like discussion groups in my school that are called colloquials, and there is this teacher that organizes it… she like chooses like who has to go… she chooses the students that are friends with her.

I: … Its not popularity… its about thinking the same as the teacher.

Since the Croft School strongly encourages its students to adopt a particular way of thinking, Bourdieu would argue that this school (like most elite schools) acts as a miniature, closed off society that shares a single lifestyle—one that is reflected in the shared goals, opinions, and values of its students.

**If you do not share the same habitus as us, you shall not enter!**

Elite schools like the Croft School attempt to select, and develop within students, a specific habitus. Ultimately, homogenous groups lead to cultural insulation, and reinforce the dispositions and values shared by all classmates. This environment allows the Croft School to produce graduates that will have the necessary capital to join the elite social class.

Citations:

Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility. Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1996. Print

Thomas, Liz. “Student retention in higher education: the role of institutional habitus.” J. Education Policy,vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 423-442, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.476.2444&rep=rep1&type=pdf. Accessed 16 Nov. 2016.

An Important Rule of Research: Let the data tell you what to focus on!

Thomas Barry / Globally Elite / Chile, Chilean Education System, co-curricular activities, co-curricular activities in Latin American schools, elite schools, extracurricular activities, Inequality, research, research process /

October 20, 2016

Research is very tricky.

Initially, my research group thought we would focus our study of the Croft School on the role parents play in shaping the academic lives of their elite children.

My partners and I are aware that parents profoundly influence the academic aspirations, self-perception, and academic achievement of their children. Elite school students attend institutions that teach them the importance of academic achievement, and their parents usually reinforce this value. Since parents play such a influential role in the academic lives of their children, and thinking we would get a ton of information on how our interviewee’s performance in school is influenced by their parents, my group thought we had chosen the perfect topic. “Wow, coming up with that proposal wasn’t so bad!” I thought to myself. I high-fived my partners, and began scouring the Internet for sources addressing the relationship between parental involvement and academic achievement.

“We just crushed that research proposal!”

“Wow!” I thought to myself, “I’m finding so much information, and it all supports what we were thinking!” Indeed, studies show a positive relationship between parental involvement, school engagement and academic performance.

I also found that the social class position of parents influences the academic opportunities, and thus the academic achievement, of their children. For example, elite schools tend to admit most of their students from the upper class, since parents of these students can afford to pay expensive tuition fees. Elite private school students regularly score above public school and subsidized (voucher) school students on the Chilean national test, SIMCE. This data shows that the social class position of parents, determined by their socioeconomic status, can significantly impact the academic performance of their children.

“I’m on a roll!” I thought to myself. However, I could not seem to find any information on the Internet or the school’s website about parents. But I didn’t let that bother me too much. I had conducted a lot of quality research, and that was what mattered.

“Your group’s case study on the Croft School and case study on the student you interview need to have a connecting theme,” Professor Howard told our class. When it dawned on me that us not finding anything about the school and its relationship to parents was actually an issue, I looked at my partners, and no words needed to be exchanged. “Dang, we have to change our topic!” our eyes said to each other.

We decided to reconvene a few nights after that class to talk about a new topic, and I was pretty stressed about it. About an hour before our group met to talk, I took Adam’s advice about how to go about coming up with a theme for the school: gather as much data on the school as you can, then find a common theme in that data. So rather than researching what I thought we should write about, I began letting the research guide me.

A few minutes into my research, I discovered that the Croft School is part of an organization of independent schools that provides strong academic programs alongside unparalleled co-curricular opportunities. These activities are intended to provide students with a holistic education that develops a wide range of talents, skills, and abilities. Indeed, according to their website, the Croft School is strongly committed to providing an integrated, holistic education, where sports, arts, and service are at its core.

When I met with my partners that night, I was excited to show them what I had found. Both of them thought studying co-curricular activities at the Croft School would be very interesting. The idea of studying just sports came up, but our group agreed it would be too narrow of a focus. So, we decided to focus on co-curricular activities in general.

Co-curricular activities!

Going forward, our group will focus on researching how co-curricular activities impact academics at, and the social structure within, the Croft School, as well as in other Latin American schools.

There are two things, however, that will determine how successful our research is. One, will our interviewee be interested in any co-curricular activities? If the answer is no, we may have to call another audible and change our topic. But we have decided we will cross that bridge when we come to it. Also, I have recently been experiencing difficulty finding information and articles on how co-curricular activities actually impact academic performance and social structure within the Croft School, as well as other schools in Latin America. While there is ample research on the positive impact that co-curricular activities have on the academic achievement and identity development of students, we may need to make inferences using this research and what we find about the Croft School online in order to develop our analysis on the school. We are still in the thick of the research project, but co-curricular activities are certainly a topic we are all very interested in and excited to (hopefully) study more deeply as the semester progresses.