‘It comes with more baggage than prestige’ : deferred culpability and disavowal among elite boys’ school alumni

Research investigating elite schools has highlighted how students within these learning environments embody and naturalise their privilege through discourses of merit, hard work, and innate talent and skill. However, relatively little is known about how privilege, and its associated discourses, moves with students beyond the school gate and into adulthood. In this paper we present accounts from elite boys’ school alumni to interrogate how they mediate representations of Self as morally ‘good and sincere’. The active disavowal of the elite education experience, and deferral of culpability from the cultural practices of these institutions feature in these accounts. In particular, the paper explores the strategies used to reconcile aspects of the elite boys’ school experience. We argue that these practices of disavowal and deferred culpability provide a degree of personal and professional mobility, from which the cultivation of a positive sense of self as a ‘good’ man emerges.

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

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