The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School

by Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández

Overview

For two years, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández shared the life of what he calls the “Weston School,” an elite New England boarding school. He sat in on classes, ate meals in the dining halls, cheered at sporting events, hung out in dorms while students baked cookies or celebrated birthdays. And through it all, observing the experiences of a diverse group of students, conducting interviews and focus groups, he developed a nuanced portrait of how these students make sense of their extraordinary good fortune in attending the school.

Vividly describing the pastoral landscape and graceful buildings, the rich variety of classes and activities, and the official and unofficial rules that define the school, The Best of the Best reveals a small world of deeply ambitious, intensely pressured students. Some are on scholarship, others have never met a public school student, but all feel they have earned their place as a “Westonian” by being smart and working hard. Weston is a family, they declare, with a niche for everyone, but the hierarchy of coolness—the way in which class, race, sexism, and good looks can determine one’s place—is well known.

For Gaztambide-Fernández, Weston is daunting yet strikingly bucolic, inspiring but frustratingly incurious, and sometimes—especially for young women—a gilded cage for a gilded age. “Would you send your daughter here?” one girl asks him, and seeing his hesitation asks, “Because you love her?”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674035683
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/30/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández is Assistant Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Table of Contents

• Introduction

1. Totally Elite
2. Getting In
3. Being Smart, Working Hard
4. Reserved Seating
5. Bonding Rituals
6. Unequal Distinctions
7. Envisioning an Elite Future

• Appendix: Researching Identification at an Elite Boarding School
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index

What People are Saying About This

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

In a book that's both generous and skeptical, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández penetrates the inner world of a top prep school, and shows how the students first construct, and then rationalize, their elite identities. Filled with irony and insight, The Best of the Best reveals both the opportunities and the casualties of privilege.
— Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, author of The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other

Editorial Reviews

In a book that's both generous and skeptical, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández penetrates the inner world of a top prep school, and shows how the students first construct, and then rationalize, their elite identities. Filled with irony and insight, The Best of the Best reveals both the opportunities and the casualties of privilege.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot