Introduction: Reading the dynamics of educational privilege through a spatial lens

Abstract

Elite schools are contentious institutions and elicit intense debate. They are seen to either represent schooling’s gold standard and to produce highly educated luminaries who rightfully take their places at the apogee of all the institutions that matter. Or they are seen as socially isolated, luxury enclaves that breed and feed privilege and power and entrenched educational and social inequality and division. No matter where one stands in relation to such debates it is difficult to disassociate ‘privilege’ from elite schools. To ask in what ways elite schools are privileged invariably attracts predictable replies. They express privilege, it is frequently argued, through their high fees and ..