Based on a unique historical source, this book examines the social origins, career expectations, and first jobs of 28,000 students in the “elitist” French secondary schools of the 1860s. Using sophisticated statistical analysis as well as conventional historical sources, the work concludes that schooling reached a wider audience than has been so far believed and that substantial social mobility occurred within the school system, but that family background, rather than educational factors, directed students’ career aspirations and achievements. It also argues that although education expanded in urban, industrialized areas, mobility did not increase in these areas. A final chapter reconsiders nineteenth–century thought concerning education in the light of findings about the social effects of schools.

Why do some elites survive while others do not? How do certain institutions manage to preserve their importance in the face of crises, instability, and change? How does a democratic society legitimize elitist institutions? Combining the use of important social theories—particularly those of Mosca, Schumpeter, Tocqueville, and Pareto—with empirical analysis, Ezra Suleiman tries to answer these questions in his examination of the dominance and stability of France's governing elites. The author draws on original survey data, historical evidence, and specialized documentary sources. His three part discussion deals, first, with the state institutions that nurture the French elite; second, with the organization, legitimization, and adaptation of the elite and its institutions; and third, with some of the policy and political implications of France's elitist system. In the final section of his book, he closely examines the relationship between elites in the public and private sectors. In his investigation of France's "state-created" elites, Professor Suleiman shows the great importance of the grandes écoles in training and promoting the elites, and the grand corps in providing a base from which the elites launch themselves into extra-governmental careers. He also finds that the elites' capacity to adapt to an evolving social, political, and economic environment is a major factor in their ability to survive. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Elite schools have an intriguing capacity to endure and adapt in the face of social, cultural and political change. They help both to reproduce power, privilege and status and also to regularly produce them afresh. The intricacies involved, over time and place, have attracted the abiding empirical, methodological and conceptual interest of sociologists and historians; recently, anthropologists and geographers have also responded to their allure. Collectively, the focus of such studies is usually on class making and the manner in which gender and race/ethnicity, place and mobility overlap and are part of the mix. This edited collection is framed around the notion of a ‘new sociology of elite education’, but it speaks into this wider space of inquiry in which studies of such schools are becoming more interdisciplinary. In so doing it brings together a new array of conceptual and theoretical tools while also deepening those that already exist. The contributions examine various configurations of contemporary class making and their attendant politics. These explorations are situated in the specificities of geographical locales where the complex dynamics of both national/local educational priorities and global/transnational forces are played out. In addition to showing how these dynamics put pressure on elite schools to redefine them, the book’s diverse international focus shines a light on new and emerging global patterns. This book was originally published as a special issue of British Journal of Sociology of Education.

Business Elites and Corporate Governance in France and the UK is a cross-national study of business elites and corporate governance in France and the UK. It examines corporate governance from a comparative standpoint and looks beneath the surface at the exercise of power and authority in two distinct national business systems. It explores key issues concerning business elites, their networks, recruitment and reproduction. It aims to shed light on the mechanisms that govern the stability and regeneration of business elites against the backdrop of an increasingly global economy.

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance of early ideas about schooling for understanding contemporary society. She presents the competing perspectives on issues such as the identity and motivations of school reformers, the broad societal changes that made educational reform seem imperative toward the end of the eighteenth century all over the West, the connections between educational change and economic development, the role of schools in the evolution of class relations, the impact of reform on family strategies in the context of early industrialization. The work concludes by assessing historical data on the social impact of school reform and addressing the social meaning of schooling in the past and in the present.

Inventing Secondary Education is the first contemporary examination of the origins of the Ontario high school, and one of the very few which focuses on the development of secondary education anywhere in Canada. The authors chart the transformation of the high school from a peripheral to a central social institution. They explore the economic and social pressures which fuelled the expansion of secondary education, the political conflicts which shaped the schools, and the shifts in curriculum as new forms of knowledge disrupted traditional pedagogical values. By the late nineteenth century the high school had acquired a secure clientele by anchoring itself firmly to the educational and professional ambitions of young people and their families. Drawn from an enormous amount of empirical data derived from school records, census manuscript material, assessment rolls, and literary and biographical sources, Inventing Secondary Education enriches our historical understanding of schooling in nineteenth-century Ontario society and illuminates some of the roots of modern educational dilemmas.