From Cookson & Persell's `Preparing For Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools'--Part 3

In their 1985 book, Preparing For Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools, Peter W. Cookson Jr. and Cardine Hodges Persell wrote the following about the U.S. power elite's private school and elite prep school educational system:

“According to Baltzell (1958) the exclusive prep school played an important role in the formation and maintenance of an American upper class…The collective identity forged in prep schools would become the basis of upper-class solidarity and consciousness…

“By camouflaging eliteness in the cloth of common dress, American prep school students generally deflect attention from their privilege. Privilege publicly worn is an affront to democracy, and the American elite discovered that inverse snobbery is more effective in masking social class difference…than flagrant snobbery and public displays of financial superiority. Thus, at the most socially elite schools the dress is often the most casual…”

From Cookson & Persell's `Preparing For Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools'--Part 2

In their 1985 book, Preparing For Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools, Peter W. Cookson Jr. and Cardine Hodges Persell wrote the following about the U.S. power elite's private school and elite prep school educational system:

“…On the East Coast, knowledge about boarding schools is largely confined to the upper class, the upper-middle class, and a small proportion of the middle class…As schools that train the children of such illustrious American families as the Rockefellers, Kennedys and Vanderbilts, prep schools have gained the reputation of being educational country clubs where children of wealthy families are sent to get socially polished and prepared for admission to acceptable colleges…

“[John F.] Kennedy’s call for `prep power’ was not altogether original…President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of State Dean Acheson were both Grotonians…Adlai Stevenson was a Choate man and Kennedy, of course, became president in 1960…

“…George Bush [I] is a Phillips Andover alumnus and…James Baker III is a Hill School graduate…

“The difference between a public school and an elite private school is, in one sense, the difference between a factory and a club. Public schools are evaluated on how good a product they turn out…

“…To be accepted into a private school is to be accepted into a social club…Because the most exclusive boarding schools have traditionally educated many upper-class children and a large number of children from high status families, they have become what we call `status seminaries’…”

From Cookson & Persell's `Preparing For Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools'--Part 1

In their 1985 book, Preparing For Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools, Peter W. Cookson Jr. and Cardine Hodges Persell wrote the following about the U.S. power elite's private school and elite prep school educational system:

"...Less than 10 percent of American high school students attend private school and only 20 to 30 percent of those are enrolled in private residential schools...If we were to reduce our sample even further to include only elite preparatory, or `prep,' schools, then the number of students attending those schools is less than one percent of the total high-school population. The one percent who attend the elite schools are not randomly selected from the population at large. They are overwhelmingly the children of the privileged classes. At one elite school, 40 percent of the 1982 graduating class was drawn from families listed in the Social Register...

"In this book we document how the philosophies, programs, and lifestyles of boarding schools help transmit power and privilege and how elite families use the schools to maintain their social class..."