When I first began at my Upper East Side private school in seventh grade, I was thrown into a world of which I had no prior knowledge, alongside very privileged and ambitious peers. My Asian immigrant parents, much like Shamus Khan's, I think, misconstrued my feelings of confusion and awe as ingratitude and shame: a spoiled child who discredited their hard work and spiraled into vain social comparison.
I later realized that I never felt inferior to my peers because their parents were wealthier or more successful: my feelings of inferiority came from my own inability to acquire and use social and cultural capital.
As a twelve or thirteen-year-old, however, I did not have the language for what I was experiencing. I had no idea what social and cultural capital were, but I did feel that my teenage peers felt more comfortable navigating social situations than most adults. When my classmates greeted adults, they did so with agility and grace, presenting themselves with polished elevator pitches, making eye contact, and maintaining the momentum of the conversation if it began to dwindle down. They treated everyone with respect and were incredibly attuned to each person's feelings. In addition to social skills, they possessed what I now know as cultural capital. When my class took a trip to see Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at the Metropolitan Opera, it was my first time listening to an opera. I was stunned by the set, the music, even the glowing subtitles on a small LCD screen attached to the seat in front of me. In a follow-up assignment for my music class, I had written that I was "teetering on the edge of my seat" during the entire performance: I was more or less met with a benign skepticism because for most of the other students, it was nothing new.
By the time I got to boarding school in ninth grade, I had began to realize that there was a set of unspoken rules at elite educational institutions. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who grew up homeless, attended Collegiate, a top New York City prep school, and now teaches Classics at Princeton, writes in his memoir, "You were really popular if you were smart—a very specific kind of fast-talking, highly literate, ever so slightly sarcastic smart." In boarding school, I retaught myself how to write, how to talk, even how to walk. I learned to write the kinds of essays my teachers liked - connecting broad ideas across different disciplines in the humanities. I learned to converse with my dining hall staff and fund managers with the same degree of comfort. I learned that this sense of ease was valued even more than academic prowess. In his book, Khan describes a St. Paul’s student named Mary who “could often be seen darting across campus, a heavy backpack on her shoulders, off to do work on a lab or in the library, or to meet with a faculty member.” Khan writes,
One could literally see the burden of her work--that heavy bag; this was made all the more notable when compared with the ways in which other students seemed to casually stroll across the grounds.
Rather than being celebrated for her virtuosic performance of "hard work" - a value that every student expressed the deepest commitment to, Mary was somewhat of a social outcast. In fact, she was often openly mocked for working hard. While most students expressed a commitment to work, just as Mary did, perhaps the only thing they actually did work hard at was appearing at utter ease, like everything was simple for them and like they had what it took. Mary was a reminder of the distance between the values expressed by the community and the way the community actually acted.
I saw myself in Mary, because I also dashed about campus in the same way that she did. It was only around my junior year when I realized that school was by far the least important component of "boarding school": no one really cares about academic achievement in the way that the students at public school or even my previous private day school had.
As Khan writes, boarding school was about "building and maintaining relationships, involving oneself in groups, and developing a distinctive personal character," not merely sitting at a desk to study. In other words, boarding school helps students build the soft skills necessary for long-term management, rather than technical skills workers must relearn every year to keep up with young talent. At boarding school, I learned to develop and cultivate privilege: a sense of knowing that I could navigate the world, and with ease.
I think Khan’s book is important for several reasons. To address inequality, we must first understand how privilege works.1 We need open, academic dialogues about class as a social category. And that requires acknowledging the advantages that an elite education brings — whether a more interesting personal “story," a sense of confidence about navigating one’s surrounding world, or the seamless transfer of intergenerational wealth. With a deeper understanding of privilege, we can then revise the measures we use to evaluate college applicants, benchmark student success, and improve public education.
I also highly recommend The Aristocracy that Let Me In, an op-ed written by a Stanford grad who received scholarships to Middlesex, a top boarding school in Massachusetts. He writes about his experience “becoming an elite” and the culture clash between his Midwest esteem upbringing and his school’s predominant Northeast WASP culture.