What are the themes of popular genres that resonate with us so strongly? With the gangster film of the 1930s, resurrected in theGodfather films in the 1970s, it's the cutthroat American business practices — wonderfully parodied. With the horror genre, established by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula, and resurrected in the 1990s with a series of vampire novels and films, it's the universal fear that we are all schizophrenic and that our monstrous sides will triumph over the better angels of our being. With the musicals of the 1940s and '50s, and their ironic perversion in Cabaret in the 1970s, it's the American Dream and the triumph of romantic love and goodness. With the classic western (think The Lone Ranger orHigh Noon) and its inverted parody in the 1960s' spaghetti westerns (think The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly), it's good triumphing over evil because of the intervention of the outsider, reluctant hero. It's also the triumph of the individual (albeit compromised by his own conflicted motivations) over the corruptions of society.
Why is CSI the most watched TV program today? Freud would say because it offers us the opportunity to experience and sublimate the show's violence (true of all the genres except the musical). Thus, our id enjoys the vicarious sex and violence, but our superego is satisfied by the outcome: successful (ego-orchestrated) investigation of the crime scene leading to punishment of the guilty. I would say that CSI, as well as the clones it has spawned, is far less Dragnet or Dirty Harry and much more Sherlock Holmes — i.e., the triumph of the rational over the irrational. It is clear why that theme would resonate with a public overwhelmed by and fearful of what seems to be an increasingly dangerous and irrational world.
In case you are wondering what this lovely exegesis has to do with the issue of class within independent schools, I would note that all of the genres also share a single common (though often unacknowledged) theme: the repudiation of the monied class in America. It is only a bit ironic that the core belief that drove, and still drives, immigrants to risk everything by pulling up roots to come to our land, the promise of freedom and the possibility of riches, is, in fact, a highly conflicted theme. In short, we love the idea of a classless society where anyone has the opportunity to get rich; but we hate the fact that some people are rich (and we're not). The rich in American popular genre works are always parodied and ridiculed for a whole host of sins and inadequacies: The effete and cowardly rich merchants in the western's town, desperately needing protection; the arrogant Hollywood producers in the musical who refuse to recognize talent; the social blue-bloods hiding terrible secrets about their draconian impulses and behaviors in the horror film; the snobbery of the rich in Titanic, living excessive and frivolous lives on the upper deck (think gated communities and country clubs) while the hired hands crowded below deck do the work and steal the hearts of the upper-class daughters.
To put it mildly, whereas our European forebears still seem to adulate royalty, our genetic code seems to reject it.
Enter the independent school.
Independent schools are more often than not parodied in film as unapproachable schools for the rich (Dead Poet's Society, Scent of a Woman, The Emperor's Club) and portrayed in mainstream news as inaccessible institutions ("the tony and elite school on the hill"). Yet, while independent schools are enthusiastically painted with that brush, the elite, private colleges are not. Why is this? The answer, I think, is simple: The public knows that smart, middle-class kids get subsidized to go to college (80 percent of students receive financial aid at the most selective colleges), but about 80 percent of kids at independent schools pay full tuition. So while both independent schools and selective colleges are academically elite, only independent schools (with a few exceptions) are socioeconomically elite.
At the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), as we've begun to have more conversations about diversity, we have found that there is more discomfort around the issue of class than around the issue of race. We can claim some success in our schools, I would say, on the latter front. But we must claim some ignorance on the former front.
Part of the reason we are conflicted about class in independent schools is that many of us have middle-class roots and altruistic yearnings. Many of us came into teaching to "make a difference" and to serve a noble purpose, educating children to create a better world. Yet it seems at times that some of our customers are too rich, too spoiled, and too demanding, making us feel more like a servant class more nanny than consigliore.
Part of the reason we are conflicted about class in independent schools is that the middle class is disappearing in America, statistically, and may have already disappeared, except for faculty kids, in our schools. In terms of income, the upper end of the middle class in the U.S. is $50–65,000 for a family of four. Families of four with that income require serious financial aid to afford our schools (as they do with colleges). In fact, 80 percent of American families could qualify for financial aid in an NAIS-member school, but only about 15 percent receive it (beyond the 5 percent receiving tuition remission because they are faculty children).1
Part of the reason we are conflicted about class in independent schools is that, in our core, we're uncomfortable with social issues attached to class in our schools. An anecdote illustrates the point: A college friend of mine and his wife, both with successful careers and good incomes, decide to move from a Mom-and-apple-pie middle-class neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut, to an upscale neighborhood in nearby New Canaan. Upon arrival, they discover that their neighborhood is in an uproar because of a re-districting plan that would assign children from their neighborhood to a high school for the "merely rich" as opposed to the high school for "the super rich" to which they were currently assigned. One neighbor at the public meeting exclaims, "There's no way I'm sending my kids to a school where they'll have to consort with children from dual-income families." While such social posturing is laughable, we fear that it is becoming more palpable in our schools.
Part of the reason we are conflicted about class in independent schools is that, increasingly, we see the stereotypes we detest about independent schools becoming more truth than hyperbole. In a June 2005 Atlantic Monthly opinion piece, "Kiddie Class Struggle," author Sandra Tsing Loh admits to abandoning her East-coast, public-school-was-good-enough-for-me liberalism when it came to getting her own first-born into a private kindergarten: "I used to mock (call them the Suzanne Vanderburg-Kiplingers), with the shining yoga faces, Mozart in the womb, natural birth, Baby Einstein, scary brain-stimulating black-and-white baby mobiles, getting on extended waiting lists for super-preschools, piano lessons at two.... They were actually right! If [I] had been paying attention, I thought, my daughter would not be sitting alone come September, with no kindergarten to go to, One Child Left Behind."
Part of the reason we are conflicted about class in independent schools is that we don't know what to do about what we are becoming, schools almost exclusively for the rich, and what we are feeling, a sense of loss.
Part of the reason we are conflicted about class in independent schools is that class changes in America today may return us to our original purposes 300 years ago, educating the social and economic and political elite so that they turn out not just equipped to "do things right" but also "to do the right things."
So where do we go from here? Regarding the middle class, we start by asking the right questions:
- What proportion of our families are middle class, not by the families' definition, but by the government's?
- Do middle-class kids and families bring a value set that we need and value?
- Does it matter that we may be becoming more financially and socially unapproachable? If so, what do we do about it?