The Upper Class Up For Grabs Analysis

Let us begin by considering how our heroes position themselves as pedagogues. Prescott and Silk spend their days passing culturally important information to the young minds in their care. While it is an exaggeration to say that they indoctrinate their students into adopting their own class values, it is certainly true that they both represent and pass on the culturally accepted knowledge and value judgements that pervades New England culture during their respective tenures. In his “The Upper Class, Up For Grabs,” Nelson W. Aldrich IV asserts that the dominant class that informed American curricula during Prescott’s tenure was wealthy, white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. “[T]he WASP upper class before 1929,” he posits, “held undisputed say over …show more content…
As Havistock hyperbolically explains, “The world of the private school,” at least as Prescott envisions it, is at an end: “The world of the gentleman and his ideals. The world of personal honor and a Protestant God. When a civilization crumbles, it crumbles all together…[including] Francis Prescott with Horace Havistock” (53). Prescott initially dismisses his friend (“You’ll be telling me I should retire next”), only to announce his retirement the next week (54). His successor, Duncan Moore, then initiates a series of reforms against which he can only rage. When he and Aspinwall discuss the fact “that Mr. Moore was considering a Negro boy for next year’s first form,” Prescott nobly claims that he would have done so had he found “boys who could really profit from Justin” (297). While his never having done so in sixty years as headmaster makes this claim doubtful, what he says next is more telling: “I’d never take just one, or maybe two, to wear as feathers in my liberal cap!” (emphasis added; 297). While championing progress in the abstract, actual proof of WASP hegemony’s slipping grip on Justin Martyr here provokes a strong defensive reaction from Prescott, who feels displaced by the