Educating Privilege: A Study of Elite Private Schools in Patna.

Research on inequality, as a matter of default, focuses on those who are at the receiving end of inequality and remain outside the purview of access to resources. This research moved away from such concerns and focused on those who verily benefit from such a system in place. It sought to turn the gaze “up” to study the affluent and the elite (Nader 1972; Howard and Gaztambide 2010). This research attempted to study elite schools as a ‘space of privilege’ (Jodhka and Naudet 2018). Both taking cue from Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1977; 1979; 1996) and moving forward in the education-consecrates-social inequality debate, this qualitative research sociologically studies elite schools as spaces of privilege and the mechanisms through which privilege is constructed, maintained and perpetuated. This research studied how elite schooling as a process leads to elite formation. The research seeks to study efforts on the part of the elite and affluent sections of the city to seek a host of measures to reproduce their status. Not only that, it also highlights the efforts made by the middle-classes in the city to consolidate their social position through educational achievements and acquiring elite status in the process.

This qualitative research employed observation, interviews and case studies methods to study, although not restricted to one elite school as done by the scholars ( Gaztambide 2010; Khan 2011), the processes of elite schooling and the mechanisms employed by these schools to reproduce the local elites as well as formation of new elites in the city.