{"id":905,"date":"2016-10-03T21:39:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T01:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/?p=905"},"modified":"2016-10-06T16:41:51","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T20:41:51","slug":"learning-eliteness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/2016\/10\/03\/learning-eliteness\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning Eliteness"},"content":{"rendered":"

A lot of people come to college expecting a completely new environment for the next four years. When I\u00a0decided to go to Colby, I started to expect four more years of the same.<\/p>\n

In fifth grade, my parents learned they needed to relocate to Boston.\u00a0I was lucky enough to earn admission and a scholarship to one of country’s top all-girls schools for sixth grade. I still remember opening my acceptance letter, which was full of\u00a0confetti in the school colors.Coming from a public Magnet school and a low-income neighborhood of color in Hartford, I was mainly excited to stop wearing\u00a0a uniform to school and finally have a reason to own a pair of jeans.<\/p>\n

graduation, 2014<\/h6>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

One of the first things I noticed during my first few days at the school was that there seemed to still be some uniform that everyone forgot to tell me about. Most of the girls in my class owned a velour Juicy Couture sweatshirt for every day of the week, usually with sweatpants to match. At least half the class already had the first iPhone, even though it had been released less than three months before the school year started. The most persistent difference I noticed between my new classmates and I was their apparent expert knowledge of colleges. Everyone seemed to know every school they wanted to attend, as well as what they wanted to study and what job they would eventually have. I onl
\ny knew about UConn and University of Hartford. I decided I wanted to attend UHart after a third grade class trip when I noticed that the dining hall had ice cream.<\/p>\n

Now, I understand this is my 11-year-old self’s version of the “Colby culture shock” that many of my friends\u00a0described experiencing as they met affluent\u00a0classmates throughout our freshmen year. When I talk about Colby being more of the same, I mean it in multiple ways. After spending seven years at an elite New England prep school, I became familiar with the idea of people having a place where they “summer,” I learned that Vineyard Vines, L.L. Bean, and Patagonia were considered essential brands of classroom\u00a0attire, and I recognized the names of reputable high schools, hometowns, and internship programs. When I arrived at Colby, I was familiar with these material items and status symbols, so when I saw them on other people, I knew to label them as “elite.”<\/p>\n

Looking back at the\u00a0way\u00a0<\/em>my school taught and empowered us, it’s clear that they tried to teach us that our elite positioning was deserved and that there were no limitations on our potential. I vividly remember a seventh-grade English teacher telling my class that we were smarter than the majority of American adults. We were repeatedly reminded that we were supposed to be influential leaders not only when we grew up, but also in the present. Over the course of my time there, the school adopted “Principles of Global Responsibility.” Similar to global citizenship, these told us yet again how special we were and that we were prepared to not only interact with the world, but to lead it.<\/p>\n

Principles of Global Responsibility<\/h6>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

In addition to these cultural symbols, I was also quite literally experiencing lots of the same at Colby. When I joined the class of 2018 group on Facebook, I encountered that I was already friends with or had at least 80 mutual friends with about a quarter of the class, who had also attended New England prep schools or some public schools in extremely wealthy Massachusetts towns. 6 other members of my graduating class were accepted to Colby, with three entering freshman year with me.<\/p>\n

the athletic complex at my high school
\n<\/h6>\n

My elite education didn’t just give me\u00a0what Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital:” privileged knowledge that proves one’s place in a group. True to its mission as a college preparatory school, I was probably over-prepared for college, especially compared to my closest friends, who all attended public schools in Maine.\u00a0Watching them\u00a0spend all-nighters in the libraries and\u00a0casually miss deadlines showed me how what I considered the seven worst years of my life really meant for my future. Instead of resenting the experience, I started to feel pride in my struggle. The hardest part of being an alumna of my school has been trying to balance the critical perspectives I developed as a less-privileged outsider during my time there with an acceptance of the privilege the education has given me. Liking Facebook posts about my school’s Forbes and New York Times ratings and wearing my class ring often feels like a betrayal of the resistant student who struggled to learn the eliteness I was surrounded with. I feel like the experience made me the “outsider within” that Patricia Hill Collins talks about,\u00a0and it’s a major reason why I am an Education major who takes Adam’s classes about social class, privilege, and oppression in American and global education. For students like me who were lucky enough to be taught, either by our families or others, how to be elite, I think it’s our job to make this kind of special education as non-elite and as accessible as possible.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n

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A lot of people come to college expecting a completely new environment for the next four years. When I\u00a0decided to go to Colby, I started to expect four more years of the same. In fifth grade, my parents learned they needed to relocate to Boston.\u00a0I was lucky enough to earn admission and a scholarship to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6678,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6678"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=905"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":977,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905\/revisions\/977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}