From Cookson & Persell's `Preparing For Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools'--Part 16

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 and indicated why the U.S. power elite continues to maintain an exclusive, undemocratic, separate, private educational system in the United States:

“…As our data [from the early 1980s] show, boarding schools are stil a man’s world [in the 1980s]. In the Porter Sargent sample of 289 schools, 92 percent of the heads are male; even at girls schools, 64 percent of the heads are male [in the early 1980s]…None of the select 16 schools has a woman head [in the 1980s]…

“Male authority is a deeply entrenched tradition of prep school life…In the prep school world, strong women usually find their mobility blocked. Leadership positions within the elite schools are something like a men’s club, where women are not made to feel particularly comfortable nor considered truly acceptable for membership…

“…Preps are taught to camouflage their interests in the rhetoric of morality and community service…There are no…protected enclaves at boarding schools, no unions, and in most cases no tenures. In some schools, there isn’t even a written contract. Teachers are simply invited back or not invited back…

“…Most heads come from middle-class or upper-middle class backgrounds in which a guiding principle is to enhance one’s status, not change the rules of the game…

“…Giving information to the administration that is detrimental to one’s peers is considered a form of treason by nearly all prep school students…

“…While the style of the schools has changed, their missions have not. If they abandon their goal of socializing students for power their very purpose is open to question…Leadership training is as much a part of the prep school mission today as when Endicott Peabody founded Groton to train leaders in 1884…”