Will Brehm  0:00
Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton, welcome to FreshEd.

Myra Hamilton  3:04
Thank you.

Clive Hamilton  3:05
It’s great to be here. Thanks, Will

Will Brehm  3:08
So, Myra, congratulations on your new book. I want to just start maybe by asking a question about elite schools and how much tuition typically costs per year.

Myra Hamilton  3:17
So, in Australia, which is the focus of the book, tuition fees at an elite private school can cost around $40,000 Australian dollars per student per year. And so, just to put it into perspective, that’s around 20,000 pounds, or around 25 to 30,000 US dollars per student per year. And we make the point in the book that it is really important when talking about private schools, to differentiate between elite private schools with these very high tuition fees and the sort of wider range of private schools that tend to charge much lower fees.

Will Brehm  3:52
Right? So, in Australia, there’s actually quite a large percentage of students that go to private school, but they’re not going to elite private schools. Or all of them aren’t going to elite private schools. That’s a sort of a smaller subset of private schools per se?

Myra Hamilton  4:03
Indeed. So, about 5% of school students go to the elite private schools, and another 35% or so of school students go to these mostly Catholic private schools that tend to charge much lower fees and operate quite differently.

Clive Hamilton  4:19
So, the elite schools we’re talking about in terms of proportion of senior students they educate, is about the same as in the United States and in Britain.

Will Brehm  4:29
So, for such a large amount of money being spent per child in some of these elite schools, do the students outperform their sort of public-school counterparts, or even their low-fee, medium-fee private school counterparts?

Myra Hamilton  4:42
Well, there is a wide perception that they do, but in fact, the research suggests that they don’t. So, when you control for socioeconomic status, there is no difference in the performance of students from public and private schools, and that means that family income and family education levels are what shapes differences in educational outcomes, not types of school attended. And when you look at actual university results, we actually start to see the reverse. So, recent research on university students has suggested that when you control for university entrance scores, it’s public-school students that do better at university than students from elite private schools.

Will Brehm  5:24
It’s quite amazing. I mean, why would a parent spend 40,000 Australian dollars per year on elite schools then, if their children aren’t going to have better learning outcomes?

Myra Hamilton  5:34
Yes, well, it’s almost as though this kind of discourse of “better education” conceals the real raison d’etre, which is the transmission of other kinds of resources. In the book, we talk about social and cultural capital, which is a term used by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. And so, elite private schools cultivate in their students’ social networks with other people with influence and cultural capital, which is a kind of ease and confidence of being and belonging in the world that includes confidence in how to navigate systems in order to succeed. So, we’re seeing that elite private schools’ kind of mobilize their histories, their rituals, and their alumni to impart these social and cultural resources on their students in ways that generate additional opportunities that aren’t afforded to others.

Clive Hamilton  6:27
And sometimes, parents who send their children to elite schools are quite upfront about saying, I sent little Johnny there or teenage Johnny there or Sarah in order to acquire a network of influential friends who could help him or her later in life, and also to acquire the kind of attitudes and self-confidence and ability to go out in the world with the qualities of a leader in order to do well in life.

Will Brehm  6:56
So, Clive, do we see that then play out in other outcomes from students that graduate from these elite private schools?

Clive Hamilton  7:03
Well, this is extremely interesting, because, you know, as Myra said, the actual academic outcomes are no better when account is taken of socio-economic status. And yet, we studied certain measures, let’s say, of socially approved success in Australia, and asked whether students who attend expensive, elite private schools are doing better today than they were, say, 40 years ago. I mean bearing in mind that we are supposed to be living in a meritocratic society, and so students who do as well academically, those who are graduates of public schools, should be occupying the higher realms of society. But when we looked at certain measures that might reflect the better outcomes of private school students, we were very surprised. For example, the most prestigious academic scholarship in the world is the Rhodes, and so we asked; Well, looking at Australia, do elite private school students today secure more Rhodes scholarships compared to, say, 40 years ago, or fewer? And we found that the share going to graduates of the most exclusive schools has actually risen over the last 40 years from 33 to 45%. Whereas state school graduates, their proportion fell. Then we asked about, well, let’s look at again, mid to late life success as measured by the top honors that Australia confers -the so-called AC like becoming a Lord in the United Kingdom. The US doesn’t have a similar thing. But we compared ACs in the roughly four years, five-year period in the 1980s with the most recent period, and we found that the share of those top honors -so Australia’s highest stamp of social esteem- the share going to elite private school graduates rose from 47 to 56% and those going to public school graduates declined. And we found similar figures with the judiciary, the appointments to the High Court, and even in areas you wouldn’t expect. Professional sports, for example, are increasingly dominated by graduates of the most elite private schools. Following a similar trend in the United Kingdom. In cricket, almost half of our Ashes team are private school graduates. And when you start to think about it, as we did, it starts to make sense, because kids who are going to go on and reach the pinnacles of success in cricket are likely to have the best coaches, the best facilities, the most encouragement through their teenage years. And the elite schools are investing enormously in the best ovals, the best facilities, hiring the best ex Ashes players and so on, in order to give their students a leg up in professional sport. So, even in areas where merit ought to be more dominant than elsewhere, we’re finding kids from elite, expensive private schools increasingly dominating. And could I just add, Will, here’s really a crucial coder to this. At the same time, we asked, Okay, class diversity in these areas -honors, Rhodes scholarships, the judiciary, sport- class diversity, if we can call it that, has been deteriorating at the same time when gender and ethnic and cultural diversity has been improving. So, we lefties pat ourselves on the back when we say, look at the fantastic success of the women’s movement and the movements for Indigenous rights and so on in Australia, enormous success. But while that’s been happening at the same time, what I would argue the kind of root inequality in our society of our class has been getting worse.

Will Brehm  10:57
And that’s kind of one of the main points of your book, it seems to me, is that there’s been an empirical increase in inequality when it comes to class, let’s say, and it seems as if that is a particularly bad thing. And this move in terms of sort of equity and social justice, in terms of distribution to representation, sort of is skewing us not to look at class as much as we perhaps should be.

Clive Hamilton  11:23
Absolutely. And this has been very much a trend within social sciences -a shift away from looking at class and inequality measured by income and wealth, towards questions of identity, of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and so on. In a way, it was a capitulation by the social scientists, because with the rise of neoliberal ideology and the dominance of it in the main political parties, it just seemed, from a kind of research and career advancement point of view on a hiding to nothing. And there are all these big, exciting, sexy issues to do with gender, race and sexuality, where academics started to put all of their efforts, but as soon as we start to think about well, here we have this improvement in gender and ethnic and cultural diversity, whilst class diversity has been declining. Well, of course, if you think about it, I mean inequality in the distribution of wealth has grown enormously, and we actually try to dovetail some of our results into those of Thomas Piketty, and it works pretty well. So, if the top 1%, if their economic power has been increasing relative to the rest of society, in particular those in the lower socioeconomic groups, why wouldn’t their privileges? Why wouldn’t their capacity to dominate society in all these areas also be increasing?

Will Brehm  12:48
In your book, you tell many different stories about how elite schools, I guess, sort of manipulate the rules of the game, let’s say, or manipulate certain laws and restrictions that might be placed on the wider public, and Covid 19 was such a moment where there were so many restrictions being placed on people around the world. And you tell these stories of how elite schools navigated some of these new rules that were coming into effect, and one of them was about this school called Redlands. And you tell a story about how Redlands was able to take 64 students from its Sydney campus and move them and take them to the snowy mountains, even though Sydney was in lockdown, Australia was in lockdown, where movement was not allowed. So, Myra, can you tell us a brief story as to how Redlands was able to navigate all of these new rules and restrictions to make sure that it was able to take these children to the snowy mountains far away from Sydney?

Myra Hamilton  13:49
Thanks, Will, yes. So, Redlands is a very expensive, elite private school in Sydney, and during Sydney’s hard lockdown in 2021 all school excursions were banned, and all school students were ordered to stay at home and learn remotely. And in fact, under the Public Health order, Sydneysiders couldn’t leave their homes, except under strict circumstances. So, most students, especially those living in disadvantaged households, were attempting to learn at home under circumstances of kind of extreme isolation and stress. But during this time, Redlands wanted to send this group of its students for a term at what it calls its high-country campus in Ginderbine for a residential program combining academic study with kind of extreme sports training. And so, in the circumstances, you would think that this would be impossible, but we saw that the request was granted. And so, we really wanted to understand a bit better what went on to facilitate this, and we submitted a Freedom of Information request to try and understand what we could about how this had come about. So, we found that the school really marshaled its quite extensive resources and specialist staff members in the middle of this serious public health emergency to find a way through these strict regulations. The school wrote to the ministry of health seeking permission, arguing that it’s not a school excursion, it’s a normal part of their school activities. To prepare, the school actually consulted with the public health liaison officer in the Snowfield -so a public servant- and it instructed its own risk and compliance manager and head of outdoor education -so some of its own specialist staff- to consult with the local public servants to put together quite a sophisticated risk management plan, which they submitted with their request. The school also liaised with the New South Wales Police, who agreed to make sure the school’s busses stopped only at the authorized places, and a local pathology service stood ready to swab the children with the help of the school nurse. So, correspondence between the school and the Ministry of Health showed that the request actually engaged the attention of a huge number of civil servants, so that at least a dozen civil servants were engaged in managing and processing the request, and a couple of PR specialists, as well as the Chief Health Officer, the leading health officer in New South Wales at the time, so one of the busiest and probably most pressured people in the state at the time, along with staff in her office. And eventually the Chief Health Officer agreed that the proposed travel could take place. So, Redlands, we found, really understood how to guide its request for special treatment through an incredibly complex bureaucracy in times of state emergency.

Clive Hamilton  16:36
Something a public school would have found impossible -not only would they have not found it possible; they would not even have thought of doing it, let alone have the specialist expertise, the political connections. So, I think it’s an excellent example of how elite privilege is mobilized to secure advantage

Will Brehm  16:56
Perhaps. And another point that you make in your book repeatedly is that it’s a social process, where it’s not just this thing that happens, but it’s actually sort of granted and allowed to happen. And there’s all of these people involved that allow the sort of privilege to take place. And so, all of the different civil servants, it just doesn’t happen naturally. You actually have this social process that unfolds. Quite amazing, in a way. The other big one that really stuck out to me in the book was about dyslexia and how families sort of seemed to mobilize the diagnosis of dyslexia to their children’s advantage. Clive, can you tell me, what’s the logic there? How does that work?

Clive Hamilton  17:35
Yeah. We were interested in this because we found ourselves studying, you know, as listeners might appreciate, as we were looking at this question of elite privilege, we constantly found ourselves drawn back to the role of elite schools in consolidating and reproducing elite privilege. And we also looked at how these schools learned to game the system. And Myra’s example of Redlands is an excellent one. The International Baccalaureate, incidentally, is another, if people are interested in reading the book they see just how that works to the benefit of the elites. But one that really was striking, Will, as you suggest, is dyslexia. And this came out of a study by a Swedish social researcher, Mikael Holmqvist, who did a very detailed examination of an elite suburban school just outside Stockholm. I won’t have the pronunciation correct, but it’s Djursholm, let’s say, and what he noticed in his ethnographic study was, that this elite school made special allowance for kids who were dyslexic. They admitted to the school a very, very intensive, competitive process to get into this school. Kids with dyslexia got some special dispensation if they were underachieving otherwise, and once there, those dyslexic students were given extra support to get through their exams and do well. And Holmqvist found that ambitious parents with underperforming children went out to have their children diagnosed with dyslexia so they would get disadvantage in their education. You might think, well, that’s bad. You know, the children will be stigmatized as being dyslexic. But in Sweden, and I think there’s a phenomenon that’s wider, dyslexia is associated with creativity, with engagement, even with leadership, and with the rise of IT, we can see that. And this struck home for us, because in Australia, there had been reports that the most expensive schools here were claiming the highest rates of disability provision when their students sat for the end of high school competitive exams, because they got special measures. They were allowed to take longer in their exams, they were allowed to take more breaks. And so, compared to state schools, the children attending these elite private schools had much higher rates of provision for kids with disabilities. Even those elite school actually winnow out from their initial selection process children with disabilities. So, the ones that require more resources mostly end up in state schools, and yet, you have all of these kids, you know, something like 20 to 25% given special dispensation at elite schools to get special treatment during the exams. Exams in which they are competing against the kids from the state schools.

Will Brehm  20:23
I want to switch the focus now to look at some of the harms that might come out when it comes to elite schooling or just privilege in general. And maybe to start, I’d be keen to understand, how do you see the sort of intersection between privilege and gender? Is there any sort of gender dynamics that sort of come out that might tell us a little bit about the harms of privilege?

Clive Hamilton  20:47
Yeah, of course. When writing a book about privilege, we think, Well, if you Google scholarly articles on privilege, you’ll get 1,000s and 1,000s of them, but they’re virtually all about male privilege and white privilege. And so, of course, we’re very conscious writing a book about elite privilege, of the phenomenon, of course, of intersectionality, the way in which elite privilege intersects with white privilege and male privilege. Although we didn’t want to get drawn into it too far, because it’s a bit too complicated, but there was no question at all, and we drew a lot in our analysis of this on the work of Jane Kenway, the Australian scholar who’s worked very, very intensively and actually quite brilliantly in this area. And our analysis, as well as Jane Kenway’s, looked at the way elite boys’ schools could sustain class privilege while at the same time reinforcing misogyny. And there have been a lot of reports in the newspapers about some truly horrendous behavior from boys at very elite, expensive private schools. Extraordinary toxic masculinity, or “hegemonic masculinity”, is the phrase that Jane Kenway uses, and she talks about what she calls the misogyny pipeline, when boys from elite schools’ transition to university, carrying with them a really combustible mix of elite entitlement and misogyny. And that pipeline, of course, takes them from those elite boys’ schools, or elite co-ed schools as well into university, particularly residential colleges, then out again from university into professions and indeed politics, where they take these both elite entitlement and the misogyny that they acquire, or which is reinforced, by these schools. So, that’s a misogyny pipeline which people will recognize from some very prominent cases in the United States, Britain and in Australia, of senior male politicians who come from elite backgrounds engaging in appalling misogynistic behavior.

Will Brehm  22:52
And the contention here is that that misogynistic sort of attitudes and behavior is learned at elite schools?

Clive Hamilton  23:01
If not learned, certainly reinforced, and there have been some truly shocking behaviors that you know, just bigger belief, particularly when the schools and the broader sort of social milieu propagates the view that children who go to these elite schools are somehow consecrated as morally superior to others in society. And then we see some truly shocking behavior which really attracts public outrage. And yet, the schools have their PR agents on speed dial, so once one of these incidents gets into the public domain, they wheel out their PR strategies and their PR experts to manage it, presenting it as the classic kind of rotten apples. You know, we’ve dealt with this problem, its contrary to the spirit and ethos of the schools, whereas we argue that, in fact, this kind of behavior is highly consistent with the spirit and ethos of these schools.

Will Brehm  24:02
And Myra, are there other harms that you identify and highlight that come out of elite privilege?

Myra Hamilton  24:09
Yeah. We talk in the book about civic, social and economic and psychic harms. When people think that public institutions are not applying the rules fairly or equally, people lose faith in those public institutions and in the rules. And we talk in the book about civic harms in relation to this kind of process. Social and economic harms arise. we say when elites impose costs on others in the exercise of their privilege, like using their influence to offer or obtain opportunities above others who don’t have privilege. Or like lobbying for policies that disproportionately benefit those with wealth. Psychic harms are, I guess, that the everyday slights and humiliations experienced by those lower down the social hierarchy. For example, we conducted a national survey as we were writing the book, and in the survey, half of Australians surveyed said they had been made to feel ashamed of the school they went to, or the suburb they lived in, and half reported feeling angry or resentful when they see wealthy people or celebrities having rules applied differently to them than to everybody else. So, we make the argument in the book that elite privilege is not just about those at the top, it creates broader social harms that affect our sense of social cohesion and our trust in public institutions.

Will Brehm  25:34
I love in the book, you sort of make the point about how we often talk about microaggressions related to race, and you sort of say that we can also think about microaggressions related to sort of class and privilege and wealth.

Myra Hamilton  25:47
Indeed. And we conducted a range of focus groups, and we heard many, many examples of situations in which people lower down the social hierarchy, you know, felt judged, ashamed, put down because of their place in the social hierarchy. And you know, many of them could describe an incident when, you know, they were given the impression they didn’t belong there, or they weren’t, you know, of the kind of person who should be moving in that sphere. And in fact, many of the people in our focus groups who were wealthy also described situations where they had observed that happening to others lower down the social hierarchy. And the interesting thing we say in the book is that, you know, we now have quite a sophisticated language for calling out microaggressions in the area of gender or cultural diversity, but we don’t really have a language to call out those kinds of microaggressions in the area of class, you know, and that can be anywhere from the schoolyard to the workplace. And so, we talk later on in the book, and I can come back to this about the importance of cultivating a language to help people start to call out when these microaggressions transpire.

Clive Hamilton  26:56
I’d just add there in terms of the microaggressions, and I think Myra used the phrase “everyday slights and humiliations”. A couple of people told stories about how at work, for example, the boss would ask them where they went to school and that they’d mentioned their nondescript state school. And I remember one said the boss, he cringed. You could see him just cringe when he mentioned the school. And it made me wonder whether the cringe and related phenomena are really powerful techniques of social control and reinforcing a hierarchy. You know, we think of it. Oh, you know that man was just a prick. But no, it’s quite common. These forms of revulsion at the specs of a person whose low-down social scale, if they talk about their job or their inability to buy something, or the school they went to. These kind of constant social messages about how what they are, in effect, is simply below those of the elites.

Will Brehm  27:53
And you can imagine, if the person went to the quote, unquote, right and proper school, the response from a boss, from saying that school, right? It would be the opposite. So, you would sort of be able to feel and experience that hierarchy in such sort of embodied ways.

Myra Hamilton  28:08
Oh, yes. We had lots of those stories as well. I mean, quite remarkable stories. We had one person in a focus group who said that they had started their first day in a law firm, and one of the partners said to them, oh, I recognize your accent. You must have gone to such and such elite private school. Go and see the partner in room so and so. And the person had gone to see this partner and who had also gone to that elite private school. And this focus group participant said it was so fantastic after that, because I immediately had a mentor in the firm who could help me to manage my way through the firm and progress within the firm based on our shared schooling history.

Will Brehm  28:48
So, before we turn to how we can perhaps begin to overcome some of this social practice of privilege, I want to turn to one more story that you mention in the book, and this is about this billionaire named Kerry Stokes, who, also during Covid, was able to fly from Boulder, Colorado, after, I guess he was on some skiing holiday, was able to fly to Western Australia into Perth, and he was able to basically cross the border into Australia when the border was supposedly closed. And he was also allowed to not isolate in a government mandated hotel, but in his own home. So, Clive, can you tell us the story about how Kerry Stokes was able to do this, but then, more importantly, how he wasn’t able to get everything he wanted.

Clive Hamilton  29:41
Yeah. It’s a terrific story. And again, we obtained some government documents through a Freedom of Information request, and there were, I should say, newspaper reports which covered some of it as well. So, Kerry Stokes is a billionaire media and mining mogul, and in Western Australia, he’s the most powerful man. He’s not the richest -but he’s very rich- but he also virtually monopolizes the media there. He owns the only major newspaper, he owns a dominant commercial television station, and basically every politician for a very long time in Western Australia has known that they will not succeed unless they suck up to Kerry Stokes. And so, yeah, he was at his ski lodge in Beaver Creek in Colorado. Australia had a lot of hard lockdowns, but none more so than Western Australia, and none more so than a certain area in Western Australia in the north, where there are a lot of Indigenous people who were believed to be particularly prone. It was a great deal of fear that Covid would spread like wildfire through these Indigenous communities. As it happened, Kerry Stokes wanted to come back to Western Australia, and he wanted to go and stay and serve out his quarantine time at a tourist town called Broome, where he had a luxury compound, but the rules were absolutely against it. Well, he shouldn’t have been allowed to get back to Western Australia, let alone go and quarantine in his luxury place in Broome. And so, he got a certificate from his doctor, who said he’s got a medical condition, we don’t know what, and he made an application to the state’s Director General of Health to get a special exemption. And that went sort of up the line to the Chief Health Officer, a man called Dr. Andrew Roberts, who had, along with the police chief, kind of decision-making power. And when it got to Andrew Roberts, he was an ex-Navy man, he was a pretty tough customer, and he just said, No, he can’t, because it’s against the rules. But he did say that Kerry Stokes would be allowed to isolate in his luxury mansion in Perth, but not his luxury estate in Broome. Well, Kerry Stokes wasn’t happy with that. He wanted to be in Broome, and so he decided to call in his friends. First of all, he appealed to the premier, Mark McGowan, who was a very close friend. They wrote to each other. Mark and Kerry swapping anecdotes. Kerry Stokes, of course, would make donations to the party and so on and so forth. And so, the Premier’s office put a lot of pressure on the Chief Health Officer, but he was a tough guy, and he said, No, it’s against the rules. So, Kerry Stokes decided to pull out the big guns. He’s very good friends at the time with Australia’s finance minister in Canberra, a man called Matthias Corman, who was a senator from Western Australia. And bear in mind that this was at the time in 2020 there was chaos and panic in the senior levels of politics while the federal government, like all governments around the world, were trying to work out how to deal with this thing -lockdowns and massive budgetary shifts and payouts. Well, the finance minister Matthias Corman found time to write to the premier in Western Australia, and the Chief Health Officer saying that, you know, he thinks his friend, Kerry Stokes, has a very, very good case, and he would appreciate it if he’d take the time to look at his case again. So, enormous pressure on the Chief Health Officer to give way to this very powerful billionaire, but -and this kind of gives us hope. I mean, in the end, the Chief Health Officer still stuck to his guns. He said, No, it’s against the rules, and he probably knew he’d be pilloried quite rightly. And so, poor old Kerry Stokes had to isolate in his Perth mansion, whereas everyone else, of course, was in a government mandated hotel. So, the all-powerful aren’t quite all powerful. A person with self-confidence, determination, and probably fairly close to retirement is in a position, occasionally sometimes, to say no and live to tell the tale. And so incidentally, Matthias Corman is now the Secretary General of the OECD in Paris.

Will Brehm  34:03
It’s such a fascinating sort of insight into how elite privilege works, and sort of that behind the scenes look like, you actually can see behind the curtain for the first time with some of these emails that you were able to obtain. And it does sort of give you hope that people in certain positions can sort of block some of this elite benefit or benefit that gets bestowed on elites. But Myra, what else can we do? Right? We’re not all people that are in those positions, or perhaps aren’t close to retirement age, and can take all of that pressure, and not all of us are confident. So, how else can we sort of throw some sand into the gears of privilege, as you say?

Myra Hamilton  34:44
Well, we think one area where considerable change could be made is in the area of elite private school. So, the school system is absolutely foundational in reproducing the class divide and elite private schools have been described by British scholars as the engine of privilege because they really just have such a foundational role in driving the perpetuation of elite privilege across generations. So, elite private schools are an incredibly important site of focus, we argue, for addressing inequality. So, for example, the tax deductibility of donations to elite private schools means that the public pays around half of the money used to build these lavish facilities for the advantage of a tiny minority of already highly privileged children. You know, you would have heard recently in the media about the very large donation to build a replica castle on the grounds of one of the elite private schools in Sydney. And the recent Productivity Commission inquiry in Australia into philanthropy really recognized this distortion of Australia’s charitable giving provisions and recommended a change, but unfortunately, the Labor Party in power currently, the current government has ruled out doing anything about it, which is a real shame, because it’s actually potentially an incredibly effective lever. The secondary we talk a lot about in the book is to really make a deliberate effort to boost educational diversity in our private and public organizations and in our Honors and awards systems. So, as we talked about earlier, we have made a lot of progress in boosting gender and cultural diversity, but class diversity is going backwards. We suggest in the book that we need some form -we suggest what we call “challenge panels”- but some form of group of people, or person, whose job it is to overcome bias in selection processes -in jobs, internships, awards, appointments and so on- to ensure that opportunities are not disproportionately conferred on people from elite private schools, and to ensure that there’s more proportionate representation of people from different schooling backgrounds across all of these areas that Clive talked about earlier -Rhodes, scholarships, on top honors, the judiciary and so on. So, starting to really make the case for greater educational diversity across these institutions is really important.

Will Brehm  37:14
It’s such a big battle, isn’t it? It’s going to be so difficult to undo some of that privilege. I mean, I like some of those ideas. I think that they’re really good starting points. I guess to end, Clive, I’d love to ask you about, you know, during this process of writing about elite privilege from so many different angles, I’d be curious to know if you have thought about your own privilege in different ways as a result of the research that you’ve done.

Clive Hamilton  37:40
Well, naturally, it forces you to think about your own situation. I mean, from the outset, Myra and I -incidentally, for your listeners, I am Myra’s father, so it’s a father-daughter gig going on here. I mean, we naturally recognize our own privilege and the advantages in life that we’ve had because we’ve got middle class background. By no means wealthy, but high in educational and cultural capital, I’m male, we’re both white. So, we’ve definitely had some serious privilege going on there, both of us, incidentally, in case people are wondering, went to state schools but we’re not of the 1% by any means, which is what this book is about. I mean, this book is about the elite at the very top that we’re talking about. How has that caused us to reflect on our own privilege and changed our perceptions? I mean, Myra is probably in a good position to comment on this as well but, I mean, because I’m longer in the tooth, I’ve got a pretty good understanding of my class and other kind of social history. I mean, I guess it caused me to -in writing the book, it’s been a process of kind of pushing back against privilege, of course, in that kind of social, political way, but also in a personal way. You know, I’m with most people out there sitting around the dinner tables and the bars in Australia and elsewhere, who actually feels outraged when I hear about the Kerry Stokes’ and the replica castles at the elite schools and the kids who got to go to the snow fields when everybody else couldn’t, and I think it’s allowed me to kind of reflect on that sense of outrage. I mean, look, if we all stop feeling outraged, then the world’s gone. But fortunately, there this subterranean rage, I think, that goes on in most societies when people hear how the elites have gamed the system in order to give themselves extra benefits.

Myra Hamilton  39:36
Yeah. I mean, I have been doing research for a long time in the area of gender diversity and in the area of age diversity in workplaces and other institutions. And, you know, have given a lot of thought to my own privilege and to my lack of privilege in different kinds of situations in those different social institutions. But certainly, the writing of this book did really, you know, challenge me to think about the privileges that I enjoy and the privileges that I don’t have access to in the context of my own class circumstances, I suppose, and in the context of my children’s circumstances. So, it’s definitely been a valuable personal activity as well as an opportunity to challenge some kind of social and structural circumstances that we feel quite strongly about.

Will Brehm  40:25
Well, Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton, thank you so much for joining FreshEd, and congratulations on your new book once again.

Myra Hamilton  40:30
Thanks, Will.

Clive Hamilton  40:32
Appreciate it.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com