Becoming an elite is no easy task; one has to go through immense training in order to gain the proper mindset. One of the important aspects of becoming an elite is having the right type of education. St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, provides exactly that. Their main emphasis is teaching the student about the bigger picture, so if ever questioned, the student will be able to provide a response that is well versed in their elite ways. In Shamus Khan’s book, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, he lets the reader into the backstage of this intricate play, called high school. He shows how each student must follow a certain “Paulie” formula, and if that formula is not followed, than the child will be nothing
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Paul’s curriculum is centered around the notions of habits of the mind and bullshit, both of which are instrumental in ensuring the success of its students. One of the main courses taught at St. Paul’s is Humanities; this encompasses a wide net of knowledge that allows the student to think about the world in a unique mindset and through a highly filtered lens. In the reading, Khan talks about how student are not hammered with the facts and long histories of what had taken place in the past, instead they are taught how to know things that would be relevant to them. Khan claims, “This program, significantly, does not teach students to know ‘things.’ The emphasis is not on memorizing historical events, for example. Instead it is on cultivating ‘habits of the mind,’ which encourage a particular way of relating both to the world and to each other” (2011:154). This goes to show how the school is building on the notion of habits of minds that one does not need to know everything in order to succeed, but it is more important on how one interprets certain information that makes the difference. Memorizing facts is easy, but true success is shown when one can decipher what is important and what is not in a moment’s notice. Students are taught from this macro-level approach, which allows them to tackle any subject that is presented and be …show more content…
As the text focuses on much of the positive in terms of habits of the mind, bullshit, and openness, it does not reflect the entire picture at hand. The ways in which these students are taught to think sets them back because they will have hallucinatory expectations of what the world is really like. What is lacking is the validity, which leads the students of St. Paul’s to develop these biased mindsets, with no calculation for the error of their
Paul’s curriculum is centered around the notions of habits of the mind and bullshit, both of which are instrumental in ensuring the success of its students. One of the main courses taught at St. Paul’s is Humanities; this encompasses a wide net of knowledge that allows the student to think about the world in a unique mindset and through a highly filtered lens. In the reading, Khan talks about how student are not hammered with the facts and long histories of what had taken place in the past, instead they are taught how to know things that would be relevant to them. Khan claims, “This program, significantly, does not teach students to know ‘things.’ The emphasis is not on memorizing historical events, for example. Instead it is on cultivating ‘habits of the mind,’ which encourage a particular way of relating both to the world and to each other” (2011:154). This goes to show how the school is building on the notion of habits of minds that one does not need to know everything in order to succeed, but it is more important on how one interprets certain information that makes the difference. Memorizing facts is easy, but true success is shown when one can decipher what is important and what is not in a moment’s notice. Students are taught from this macro-level approach, which allows them to tackle any subject that is presented and be …show more content…
As the text focuses on much of the positive in terms of habits of the mind, bullshit, and openness, it does not reflect the entire picture at hand. The ways in which these students are taught to think sets them back because they will have hallucinatory expectations of what the world is really like. What is lacking is the validity, which leads the students of St. Paul’s to develop these biased mindsets, with no calculation for the error of their