ABSTRACT
This book is concerned with ‘elite education’. Specifically, it seeks to document the ways in which two key mechanisms pervasive in education today play out across various national contexts. First, many schooling systems claim to be acting as a vehicle for social mobility by ‘rewarding’ academic ability and ambition with the opportunity to pursue high status, sometimes accelerated, trajectories into higher education and beyond (Brown 2013). However, a second significant pressure shaping education configurations is the way in which well-resourced groups act to ensure that their demands and choices are met (van Zanten and Maxwell 2015). In many cases, a commitment to promoting social mobility through education is linked to the principle of democratisation – increasing equality of opportunity for all to receive a rigorous and relevant schooling experience (Green 2013). In contrast, elite group and elite status recruitment cuts across the openness of this process, rendering democratic outcomes less likely. It is the various ways in which this dialectic is articulated across different national contexts – how desires for democratisation work within and alongside the demands and expectations of elite groups – that shape the purpose and structure of a national elite education system. It is this problematic that we examine further through the collection of papers offered here.
