Shamus Rahman Khan, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School
Bibliographic record
Abstract
P rivilege takes us into the world of St. Paul's, an exclusive boarding school, to examine the new American elite.In this well written ethnography, Khan returns to his alma mater as a teacher and researcher and discovers a transformed institution.Gone are the minority student dorms and (overt) expressions of old money and connections.In its place, the school prides itself on its racial diversity, the inclusion of women, and scholarships that allow superb disadvantaged students an education at St. Paul's.Years after graduating, Khan finds himself in a school that eschews notions of "who you are" in favour of "what you've done."Students who rely too heavily on family legacies are sequestered, and reside in a new version of a minority dorm Khan found himself in almost twenty years before.The faculty, staff and students aspire to model a world of diversity, cultural flexibility and hard work.Although much has changed at St. Paul's, the fundamental mission of the school remains.Students at St. Paul's learn how to embody privilege, much as they have throughout the school's 150 year history.What we learn from Khan is that while the method of doing privilege has changed, the ability of the elite to reproduce themselves has remained remarkably stable.Perhaps more problematic is that the new language of meritocracy (what you do, rather than who you are) allows them to frame their position as the sole result of talent and hard work.Students at St. Paul's learn to explain their good fortunes as a result of these qualities, and by default in contrast to the lack of these traits among the less advantaged.Do students at St. Paul's work hard?Through his year long tenure at St. Paul's, Khan learns that the most successful students are not necessarily the hardest working.He notes that many women, minority, and scholarship students work harder, seeing St. Paul's as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.The cruel irony is that while these students are memorizing Plato, their more successful peers are learning to embody what Khan refers to as the "ease of privilege."Masters of this lesson cultivate a distinct way of carrying themselves.They feel at ease in a variety of social settings, and learn an interactional style that allows them to "cre-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".