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Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School cover
SEE THROUGH IT

Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School

by Shamus Khan

Prep school as power factory.

For you if

you want to understand how inequality gets reproduced quietly inside the institutions that claim to be above it

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Khan’s Privilege is a chilling, clear-eyed look inside one of America’s most elite boarding schools — a training ground where advantage isn’t inherited so much as produced. Through immersive ethnography, he shows how institutions like St. Paul’s groom young people not just with resources, but with a worldview: entitlement disguised as ease, inequality reframed as merit, and power naturalized through culture. It’s a study of how elites learn to move through the world frictionlessly — and how that “effortless” grace is built on structures designed to exclude. A must-read for understanding how class reproduces itself with a smile, a handshake, and a legacy letter.

Where This Book Lives

Themes
class and privilegeeducation critique

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