Samhällskunskap för alienerad elit : Observationsstudie av Särskilda läroverket

This thesis is built around an observational study of a class at an elite school. The study follows the class through their upper secondary school education (ages 16-19), focusing on social science lessons. I have used ethnographic methodology to describe and problematize how social science and value-based ambitions of equality conflict with the student role of superiority cultivated at this school. This study of an elite uses a fly-on-the-wall distanced position of an included stranger. In the perspective of research on elite schools, the school is characterized as performing in the shadow of a more classic elite school tradition. The more traditional national boarding and cathedral schools use characterizations of age and tradition to legitimize their elite status. This is a characterization that the studied free school (approx. charter school) is trying to mimic despite its recent establishment.A concept of alienation including superiority frames the performed excellence noted during the observations. A concept of alienation without powerlessness is developed theoretically in this dissertation and used to analyse the material from the observations. A contemporary kind of stoicism is investigated within the concept of alienation. Stoicism within alienation describes the students’ ways of distancing themselves from what they learn, not giving any expression of whether what they learn influences what choices they make as they shape their lives and values. The social science subject at the elite school is characterized by a “dialectical didactics of turning away”, or of abandonment.In several ways the dissertation relates to power: a social hierarchy where supremacy and subordination becomes less black and white. The dissertation concludes by discussing the limited freedom of students who must negotiate egalitarian contra elite values in their social sciences education. In understanding egalitarian values in the perspective of power, Simone de Beauvoir’s (2018 [1947]) concept of freedom is useful: one’s own ...