I really liked the Flanagan article too - I grew up in the milieu of people in public schools in the UK (which as you know is private schools) and it was a very similar story. Even in my teens I was pretty aware of how bad it was for society (much to my parents' disappointment) but over there It's basically the top public school -> oxbridge -> the cabinet pipeline. I think I see the UK and US on a similar trajectory in more areas than I have in previous years (especially under Johnson's government) and this is one of them. It's so detrimental to the social good.
Ps there was another great article recently about how the Ivies and schools that feed them are churning out the elite who hate the elite - not in the way I dislike the elite for being entitled arseholes, but in the sense that they are using the elite system to get into government and then slamming "the elites" as a way to undermine government. It was talking about the likes of Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz etc, but it really had a wider scope in my view because it so reflected a lot of what Flanagan wrote (even though she hadn't written it by that point.) That article also spoke to the current state of affairs in the UK.
I really liked the Flanagan article too - I grew up in the milieu of people in public schools in the UK (which as you know is private schools) and it was a very similar story. Even in my teens I was pretty aware of how bad it was for society (much to my parents' disappointment) but over there It's basically the top public school -> oxbridge -> the cabinet pipeline. I think I see the UK and US on a similar trajectory in more areas than I have in previous years (especially under Johnson's government) and this is one of them. It's so detrimental to the social good.
Ps there was another great article recently about how the Ivies and schools that feed them are churning out the elite who hate the elite - not in the way I dislike the elite for being entitled arseholes, but in the sense that they are using the elite system to get into government and then slamming "the elites" as a way to undermine government. It was talking about the likes of Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz etc, but it really had a wider scope in my view because it so reflected a lot of what Flanagan wrote (even though she hadn't written it by that point.) That article also spoke to the current state of affairs in the UK.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2021/01/29/long-read-how-elite-universities-have-promoted-destructive-republican-leaders/