Citation

O'Brien S. Rev. Educ. Pedagog. Cult. Stud. 2014; 36(4): 260-273.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/10714413.2014.938565

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The author describes the 2012-2013 school year at East Hampton High School in New York, which began with tragedy. In late September, a sixteen-year-old student, an immigrant from Ecuador, committed suicide. This was the second suicide in three years, followed two weeks later by the third, committed by a student about to transfer to the school. Asked in an interview to reflect on the past year, the principal of East Hampton (ranked as one of the best schools in the nation, with many graduates going on to Ivy League universities) "'sighed and moved his hand up and down, suggesting a roller coaster. 'Resiliency,' he said. 'That's my theme word for graduation'" (quoted in Rutenberg 2013). In this article the author considers the popularity of resilience in relation to its more specific emergence in the constellation of issues raised in the East Hampton story: class, race and education. Without seeking completely to discount the value of resilience as a focus and strategy for individuals, institutions, and communities, she concurs with those critics who counsel wariness, regarding the all-too-neat alignment between the concept of resilience, or the capacity to thrive through change, and the ideology of neoliberalism (Botterell 2009; Evans and Reid 2013; Joseph 2013; Neocleous 2012; O'Malley 2010; Walker and Cooper 2011; Zebrowski 2009). In particular, she notes the enthusiastic embrace of resilience by independent schools at a time of growing social disparity and reduced funding for public schools, and suggest that this trend is not just symptomatic of this disparity, but complicit in its deepening.

Language: en