A sociological perspective of an elite private high school by an insider who is both an alumnus and a teacher

Dr. Khan has had a unique and rare experience: he went to St. Paul's boarding school as a kid and later taught there for a year. St. Paul's is one of America's most elite and most expensive boarding schools in America, so this is an experience very few have. He reflects deeply on his experiences there, the different types of children he met, their commonalities and differences, and tries to make sense of it all. I thoroughly enjoyed this page turner, and I finished it in a week.

Still, I feel as though Dr. Khan did not exploit the full range of voices to which he had access to flesh out his analysis. For example, the voices of the parents of these children are completely absent, save for a few grumbles about who's paying the checks and a couple universal scenes of parents embarrassing their children regardless of economic class. I would have loved to hear how parents think about the elite boarding school experience, how they justify the massive expense, what they believe their children are learning, how they think about the world, and what they do to be able to afford this expenditure. Or, likewise, how the children think about their parents — what do they know and think about their parents? Can they explain what their parents do? Do they interpret St. Paul's as a sort of abandonment or dereliction of parental duty, or do they share the perspective of their parents in thinking of this as an investment? What are their lives like during the weekends and vacations away from St. Paul's?

In his final chapter, Dr. Khan tries to defend that his anthropological methodology of living among a bunch of high schoolers for a year reveals important truths about decades-long global trends of cultural change and economic inequality. This was not convincing in my opinion. But this does not detract from the curiosity of this book and how interesting it is to peer into the lives of these people. Certainly some understanding can be gained from Dr. Khan's study, and given the secrecy, obfuscation, and sparsity of data surrounding the lives of the rich, I believe it would be hard to find much better sources. But still, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The narrator for the audiobook version is very clear and gives unique voices to each of the children, which makes it easier to follow when Khan has transcribed conversations.

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