Perfectly accomplished? Biographical trajectories and the production of inequality among exclusive boarding school alumni in Germany

ABSTRACT

Given that exclusive boarding schools in Germany are repeatedly referred to in public and academic discourses as places of elite education, the question arises as to the consequences of boarding school socialisation and how these schools affect the post-school biographies of their alumni. This qualitative study examines the autobiographies of alumni aged approximately 30 years who attended either expensive progressive education boarding schools (in the tradition of Landerziehungsheime) or state boarding schools for the highly gifted in Germany, which likely cater to different class fractions. The autobiographical narratives of 31 alumni were interpreted using biographical analysis. The results are discussed in relation to the habitus of boarding school students and the question of what this means for alumni’s post-school biographical trajectories and their social positioning in terms of habitus and capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Boarding school alumni
• exclusive boarding schools
• autobiographies
• Germany
• biographical narrative analysis

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank here student assistants engaged in the research project, Arne Arend, Eleonore Freier, Franka Hans, Alexander Hellner, Charlotte Schweder, all members of the interpretation workshops at the Centre of School and Educational Research at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg and especially Simona Szakács-Behling at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, Braunschweig as well as the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments at various stages of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Reformpaedagogik is an umbrella term that describes pedagogically, politically, and ideologically heterogeneous reforms of schools, teaching, and education in general in Germany. It was also an international phenomenon, variously known as New Education, Progressive Education, or Nouvelle Education, which had its origins in cultural criticism and the social and cultural reform movements at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century (Link, 2018).

2. In the course of the pedagogical reform movements, experimental Landerziehungsheime (also called New Schools or Écoles Nouvelles) were founded, which turned away from the traditional state school and its methods and aimed to place the child at the centre of education with new methods such as manual or close-to-nature teaching. These schools were established in the countryside. The ‘New School Abbotsholme’, founded by Cecil Reddie in England in 1889, which propagated a departure from the forms and content of the traditional education and strict regimes of English boarding schools, was the model for the first of these German schools, founded by Hermann Lietz in 1898 (Skiera, 2003).

3. In this paper, I draw on 4 out of 31 individuals and focus on exemplary experiences from each; more of these will be detailed upon in other publications.

4. This is the experience in Germany, but maybe it also speaks to other contexts, as Kennedy and Power (2010) and Patterson (2020) indicate.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under grant number 366762907.

Notes on contributors

Ulrike Deppe

Dr Ulrike Deppe is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Zentrum für Schul- und Bildungsforschung, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany. Her research interests include education, socialisation, and the construction of social differences within educational institutions, families, and peer groups.