Doing class analysis in Singapore’s elite education: unravelling the smokescreen of ‘meritocratic talk’

Elite schools are in a ‘class’ of their own. The use of ‘class’ to describe elite schools here is a synthesis of meanings borrowed from the Marxist and Weberian traditions. To the former, ‘class’ is defined relationally to the ownership of resources, material interests and wealth (Wright 2008) whereas for the latter, to belong to a ‘class’ implies a status group membership defined and demonstrated by ‘symbolic materials and subjective dispositions’ in addition to ownership of economic resources (Gaztambide-Fernández 2009, 11).