Shamus Rahman Kahn: Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School

In Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, Shamus Rahman Kahn provides empirical research, discussion, interviews and commentary on the raising and educating of the children of the “new privileged.” Standardized testing, need-based financial aid, affirmative action and generally a more open attitude toward inclusivity and diversity has moved our society far away from the inequality in education that existed up to the late 20th Century. For example, the Kahn cites research that shows that only 0.8 % of the students at elite colleges were black in 1951, whereas today, more than 8 % of the students at Ivy League are black. In this new society where children of the aristocrats are no longer entitled to things but must work to retain their status, some adolescents of the aristocrats struggle to find a place, while some have acclimated to and thrive in this new environment. Kahn displays his research in the context of St. Paul’s School, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire where Kahn attended as a student and also returned later as a teacher and a researcher. …