Globally elite: four domains of becoming globally-oriented within elite schools

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools across the world, this article explores how elite schools prepare students for an increasingly interconnected world characterised by difference and competition through global citizenship education. In this exploration, I identify the four domains that give meaning to global citizenship education within elite contexts: cultural, relational, emotional, and material. These domains reveal the ways in which these schools are responding to the challenges of globalisation by providing students opportunities to develop awareness and knowledge of differences, to establish and maintain relationships across differences, to gain a sense of obligation towards others, and to accumulate valuable forms of human and cultural capital. Through globally-oriented practices, students are being prepared to be flexibly mobile, to imagine themselves as leaders within a globalised world and to thrive in the hypercompetitive and unpredictable global knowledge economy. These practices play an important part of elite schools’ larger strategy of making and remaking elites.

KEYWORDS:

• Elite schools
• global citizenship education
• social class
• global orientation
• globalisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.