{"id":1314181,"date":"2019-08-31T21:40:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-01T03:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/will-column-an-all-too-real-parable-of-privilege-hoarding\/"},"modified":"2019-08-31T21:40:00","modified_gmt":"2019-09-01T03:40:00","slug":"will-column-an-all-too-real-parable-of-privilege-hoarding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/will-column-an-all-too-real-parable-of-privilege-hoarding\/","title":{"rendered":"Will column: An all-too-real parable of \u2018privilege-hoarding\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nestled on the Front Range of the Rockies, the city of Crystal was a largely upper-middle-class paradise, chock full of health-conscious and socially conscious \u2014 meaning, of course, impeccably progressive \u2014 Coloradans. Then in slithered a serpent in the form of a proposal for a new school, to be called \u201cCrystal Academy,\u201d for \u201caccelerated and exceptional learners.\u201d Suddenly it was paradise lost.<\/p>\n

This \u201cdeliciously rep ulsive\u201d story (one reviewer\u2019s scrumptious description) with \u201cBig Little Lies\u201d overtones (the same reviewer) is told in Bruce Holsinger\u2019s compulsively readable new novel \u201cThe Gifted School.\u201d It is perfect back-to-school reading, especially for parents of students in grades K-12. And it is wonderfully timely, arriving in the aftermath of Operation Varsity Blues \u2014 who knew the FBI could be droll? \u2014 which was the investigation into a very up-to-date crime wave, the scandalous goings-on among some wealthy parents who were determined to leave no ethical norm unbroken in their conniving to get their children into elite colleges and universities.<\/p>\n

In Holsinger\u2019s book, school officials, speaking educationese, promise that as 100,000 children compete for 1,000 spots \u2014 the dreaded 1% rears its ugly head \u2014 there will be \u201ca visionary, equitable, and inclusive admission process.\u201d Four mothers who have been friends forever, but might not be for long, begin becoming rivals in what they regard as a nearly zero-sum game, as they plot to game a process that looks alarmingly fair. Their children are embarked on a forced march to demonstrate that they are \u201cgifted,\u201d a word \u201cthat slashed like a guillotine through other topics\u201d: \u201cAdvanced math, Chinese, martial arts, flute lessons with the principal player in the Colorado Symphony: by eighth grade Tessa had become a living, breathing benchmark, a proof of concept for the overinvested parenting they all practiced with varying degrees of obliviousness and guilt.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is what Holsinger calls \u201cadvantage hoarding\u201d and the \u201cdelicate ecology of privilege.\u201d Everything is hypercompetitive, even among Crystal\u2019s 11-year-olds, from History Day at school to the travel soccer teams, which involve \u201ca lot of mileage, a lot of Panera\u201d in an Audi Q7 with a \u201cFeel the Bern\u201d bumper sticker, with \u201call the Patagonia parents huddled by the pitch, cheering on their spawn in socially appropriate ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

When one father takes his toddlers to a playground and other parents ask about his children\u2019s ages, he subtracts a few months to make them seem developmentally remarkable, for the pleasure of seeing \u201cthat flicker of worry in the parents\u2019 eyes.\u201d And when rival children do not make the cut for the new school, schadenfreude drapes the Rockies like snowdrifts.<\/p>\n

Because Crystal Academy is to be a magnet for students whose transcripts are clotted with AP (advanced placement) courses, it is definitionally elitist, and consequently an awkward fit for good (and affluent, and credentialed) progressives who are determined to lie and cheat in order to maximize the already considerable advantages of their family cultures. Students\u2019 submissions for a school\u2019s science fair become the parents\u2019 projects.<\/p>\n

Soon, and inevitably, there is a movement against the new school: \u201cWe are a group of concerned parents strongly opposed to the creation of the new public magnet school for allegedly gifted students. We believe that gifted education should be democratic, egalitarian, and nonexclusive.\u201d Holsinger\u2019s \u201callegedly\u201d is priceless in conjunction with the insistence on gifted education that eschews exclusivity and inequality. It is not easy being an affluent progressive and a scourge of privilege.<\/p>\n

The parents in Holsinger\u2019s book insist that their corner-cutting, truth-shading, thumbs-on-the-scale maneuverings and brazen lies are, as people usually say, \u201call for the children.\u201d All, that is, except for the large dollop that is for the bragging rights of parents who have hitched their status anxieties to their children.<\/p>\n

Now teaching English literature at the University of Virginia, Holsinger previously was at the University of Colorado, and he says Crystal is a \u201creimagined Boulder.\u201d He probably did not have to strain his imagination. He told The Wall Street Journal that you take \u201cover-parented kids, over-invested parents, a cutthroat [college] selection process, and the rest kind of writes itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has deftly written a satire that arrives when it is needed most \u2014 when it is difficult to distinguish from sociology. As America becomes more cognitively stratified, with rewards increasingly flowing to the well-educated (or expensively credentialed, which is not the same thing), the recent college admission scandal has become, Holsinger says, \u201cone of the great cultural parables of our time.\u201d It is a parable about, in another Holsinger phrase, \u201cprivilege-hoarding,\u201d as American life uncomfortably imitates his art.<\/p>\n

George Will\u2019s email address is georgewill@washpost.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nestled on the Front Range of the Rockies, the city of Crystal was a largely upper-middle-class paradise, chock full of health-conscious and socially conscious \u2014 meaning, of course, impeccably progressive \u2014 Coloradans. Then in slithered a serpent in the form of a proposal for a new school, to be called \u201cCrystal Academy,\u201d for \u201caccelerated and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1314181","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-26 19:41:24","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1314181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1314181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1314181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1314181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}