The joy of privilege: Elite private school online promotions and the promise of happiness

This chapter focuses on interview situations with individuals in charge of shaping the images and reputations of the schools. Headmasters and managers extensively built their discourses around an image of Swiss private schools, all the more, perhaps, because the author was perceived as a foreigner. The school representatives are highly educated and they have upper-class backgrounds. The interviewees emphasised their status as regional economic actors. Boarding school headmasters have indeed manoeuvred as entrepreneurs in protecting and building a private educational sector on a par with other economic actors in Switzerland and through transnational circulations of pedagogies and social networks. The pedagogical vision that the headmaster of Rivage School conveyed merged his family trajectory with the history of alternative pedagogies. School owners and managers shifted from educational matters to economic matters rather naturally, using the analogy between family business and family education.