Drew, Christopher and Gottschall, Kristina and Wardman, Natasha and Saltmarsh, Sue (2016) The joy of privilege: elite private school online promotions and the promise of happiness. In: Elite schools: multiple geographies of privilege. Education in Global Context. Taylor & Francis (Routledge), New York, United States, pp. 87-100. ISBN 978-1-13-877941-9
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Abstract
[Introduction]: Images of happy, successful students are ubiquitous in 'the education landscape and the
idealized childhoods it invites us to imagine' (Saltmarsh, 2011, p. 33). Through a broad range of texts, policies and everyday practices, cultural imaginaries that equate childhood with happiness as simultaneously an ideal, an entitlement and a natural state of being, furnish
normative frames of reference for which cultural understandings of childhood and studenthood emerge (Saltmarsh, 2011; Chapman & Saltmarsh, 2013; Fisher, Harris, & Jarvis, 2008; Youdell, 2006). In this paper, we consider how the promotional texts of elite private
schools in Australia draw upon and contribute to the discursive constitution of childhood happiness as a commodified feature of ideal studenthood. We argue that in elite school promotions, happiness functions alongside institutional narratives of gender, sexuality, race
and social class as a device that equates social status and privilege with idealised imaginaries of child/student subjectivities.
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