Introduction
There are poor people in this orderly world. There are also freaks of nature, Siamese twins, railway accidents: those anomalies are nobody’s fault. The worthy poor do not realize that their function is to exercise our generosity.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (Reference Sartre1964: 33)
Ethnographies of elite private schools have flourished for over fifteen years now [Chancer Reference Chancer, Timmermans and Tavory2020; Howard and Gaztambide-Fernandez Reference Howard and Gaztambide-Fernandez2010; Khan Reference Khan2012]. Sociologists have established that such schools shape privilege, as shown in Khan’s ethnography of St Paul’s boarding school [Reference Khan2011]. Privilege describes students’ ease in their interactions with staff, teachers, and other students, a defining feature of the “new elite.” This new elite does not learn distinction per se but a more “normal,” “ordinary” [Bozouls Reference Bozouls2022; Sherman Reference Sherman2018] habitus, shifting from conspicuous consumption patterns [Veblen (1931) Reference Veblen2007]. In these schools, learning how to “own” [Kuusela Reference Kuusela2018] involves the cultivation of an appropriate relation with (often inherited) wealth.
Yet private schools are not the only institutions where privilege is cultivated. French classes préparatoires, public universities and grandes écoles have a long history of shaping and training the elites of the country [Bourdieu and Passeron Reference Bourdieu and Passeron1970; Darmon Reference Darmon2015; Pasquali Reference Pasquali2021]. The role played by the French higher education system is now well-understood, but we need to know more about the making of elite dispositions earlier in the educational track. Public primary schools are landmark socializing spaces, and some of them are very socially homogenous. In this article, I argue that learning to give is one of these elite dispositions. Few sociologists have considered the fact that part of becoming elite involves a “philanthropic education” (hereafter PE)Footnote 1, in which children learn to show concern and help social “others,” financially or not. PE takes place in private and confessional schools [Bertron Reference Bertron2015], yet public schools’ moral and civic education curriculum may also serve for this purpose.
That schools teach how to give is an important starting point. It raises several questions that informed my initial concerns when I began investigating Giving is Good (hereafter GiG)Footnote 2, the philanthropic program described in this article. The first interrogation is that of the “learning” in “learning to give”— a question about socialization practices [Darmon Reference Darmon2008, Reference Darmon2015]. What are the concrete processes involved in elite philanthropic socializations and how are they fostered? I believe that how elites learn to give matters as much as why they do it. This work seeks to open the black box of philanthropic socializations by tracing back to their origins, in order to understand how dispositions are concretely “caught” in elite class settings [Darmon Reference Darmon, Lignier, Pagis and Mennesson2019]. Thus, ethnography is a valuable tool in grasping the emergence of an elite habitus.
The second question is what “giving” in “learning to give” means. Deciphering what “giving” means and what practices it involves is essential because it reflects our vision of what should be free and how we think about helping others. The investigation started from the premise that philanthropy is both a fiscal and an affective process [Bory Reference Bory2023] – one in which it is crucial to understand how the will to help others emerges [Sklair and Glucksberg Reference Sklair and Glucksberg2021]. “Giving” is also a cultural practice. Yet, to the question of why such practices are still underdeveloped in France [Camus-Vigué Reference Camus-Vigué, Lamont and Thévenot2000], one almost always finds naturalizing differences in philanthropic cultures [Zunz Reference Zunz2011] or conceptual accounts [Gautier Reference Gautier2019]. The practices of philanthropy and education are barely mentioned. This is what drove my interest in organizations like Giving is Good, which explicitly focus on philanthropic education. This article is one of the first to ground philanthropy in early elite school socializations, between 9 and 10 years old, emphasizing its long lasting social and moral consequences. Philanthropic practices are no more innate than wealth management practices in families with dynastic fortunes [Herlin-Giret Reference Herlin-Giret2019; Higgins Reference Higgins2022; Kuusela Reference Kuusela2018]. They can even be considered as part of wealth management practices, or what I describe as “privilege management.”
Contrary to the growing scholarship on the cultural and economic reproduction of economic elites, this work does not take the perspective of fiscal “experts,” “professionals” of philanthropy or elite bureaucratic rational management [Shiffer-Sebba Reference Shiffer-Sebba2025]. The questions formulated here were oriented toward an understanding of the lay meaning of philanthropy in a elite public school, and especially its significance for children. This is also why “philanthropy” is used so extensively in this work, contrary to most definitions of institutional philanthropy [Barman Reference Barman2017]. I wanted to know what philanthropy could mean in a public primary school and how it was introduced to children in an accessible manner. In the broader work from which this article is derived, I also investigated the organizational structure of GiG as well as its connection to the two foundations that fund it. Such questions were left aside here.
Turning philanthropy into ease: learning to give in Paris’ 17th arrondissement
This article explores the philanthropic socializations of an elite public primary school, Leclerc, located in Paris’ 17th arrondissement (or neighborhood). More specifically, it focuses on the making of non-academic cultural dispositions in schools such as empathy and “philanthropy” and asks: how is philanthropic education turned into a privileged ease?
Founded in the early 2010s in Paris, Giving is Good is a nonprofit organization established to “use philanthropy as a pedagogical tool to awaken young generations to civic engagement.” Supported financially by two of France’s largest philanthropic foundations, the nonprofit developed a “turnkey” school program that can be deployed in both public and private schools. The curriculum relies on a “project-based pedagogy that meets the objectives of moral and civic education,” with the possible support of a volunteer to help teaching in the class. It covers the 18 hours devoted to moral and civic education (hereby MCE) each year in 4th and 5th grade, in two parts. The first is aimed at fostering children’s awareness of various global issues such as the environment, public health and education with the help of six detailed press reviews. It focuses on empathy—“the ability to feel what the other feels”—and progressively shifts to philanthropy framed as “the process of converting emotional understanding into concrete efforts.” Children go on to vote for their preferred cause and choose a nonprofit organization to help. The second part of the program helps children to make a direct contribution to the “common good.”Footnote 3 They organize, advertise and conduct their own philanthropic action. The program ends with a feedback session in which children reflect on what they have learned and what the program has changed for them.
As of 2025, GiG has been introduced in over 100 schools and is officially backed by the Department of Education. Teachers can ask to be part of the program by simply signing up online. Among the participating schools, the average Social Position Index (SPI)—a non-standardized indicator of social homogeneityFootnote 4—was 113.6 in 2023 compared to the national French average of 104.2. This indicates that most children in the program typically came from families where at least one parent held a high-level public service executive position or an equivalent professional status. In Ile de France—the greater Parisian area—schools implementing GiG had an average SPI of 118.9, compared to the regional average of 111.7. Within Paris specifically, the program’s school average matched exactly 122.9, slightly under the city level.Footnote 5 Schools participating in GiG therefore operate in upper-middle class settings.
This article examines a year-long implementation of the GiG program at Leclerc, a school recruiting from a tight geographical area within Paris’ south 17th arrondissement—quartier Ternes. Unlike other uniformly affluent neighborhoods close to the south of the 17th (like the 8th or 16th arrondissements or Neuilly-sur-Seine), the 17th reflects considerable socio-economic diversity. At the turn of the century, this IRIS (a sub-communal unit) contained both upper-class and working-class profiles [Préteceille Reference Préteceille2003]. Yet this arrondissement is particularly subject to a logique de quartier (neighborhood effect) where the South-West area (La Plaine-Monceau and Ternes) offers levels of wealth comparable to other affluent neighborhoods while the North-East area (Batignolles and Epinettes) has been gentrifying over the past two decades but is still much more socially diverse. This neighborhood effect is reinforced by the recruitment of public schools, sometimes in less than a square kilometer of Paris. Leclerc, for instance, recruits exclusively within Ternes, the South-East part of the 17th, characterized by Préteceille as a subcase of the spaces of the ruling elite—an SBE, espace de la bourgeoisie à prédominance de chefs et de cadres d’entreprise (bourgeoisie space, predominantly made up of business leaders and executives). In his typology of Ile-de-France, Préteceille [Reference Préteceille2003: 24; Reference Préteceille2006] calculates that SBE spaces contain a higher density of executives and at least 48.5% of upper classes in the active population. This category includes the whole of the 16th arrondissement, parts of the 8th and the 7th arrondissement, and Ternes, as well as other affluent suburbs, where the economic bourgeoisie is prevalent. If considered an independent city and despite this internal socioeconomic variation, the 17th would rank as the tenth richest “city” in France based on household assets, with an average of €2.5 million per household.Footnote 6 If assessed by the number of households subject to property wealth tax, it would emerge as the third richest “city” in the country.Footnote 7 The school recruits within this quartier: Leclerc’s SPI in 2023 is 143 and therefore dramatically surpasses both the French national average (104.2) and the Parisian average (122.9). The disparity between the Parisian average and the school average has widened over time, expanding from 17.4 points in 2017 to 20.5 points in 2023. In 2024-2025, it had reached 145. This places Leclerc well over the top 1% of the most privileged schools (SPI>140) in France.
Data and methods
In order to understand the making of elite philanthropic socializations, I conducted nine months of ethnographic fieldwork as a volunteer for GiG at Leclerc, as well as several observations in the same school but with different classes the following year. Of the three schools I was able to volunteer at based on proximity to where I lived, I chose Leclerc because it was both public and wealthy. At Leclerc, a school nestled within high Haussmannian walls, I assisted two teachers in implementing the program: Sylvie, a 5th grade (CM2) teacher, and Emelyne, a 4th grade (CM1) teacher. My missions, detailed in a 50-page volunteer guide, ranged from: “implementing the program according to the requirements and instructions of GiG,” to being “a program ambassador and promoter,” as well as helping “develop all the useful contacts and volunteers for the program’s development.”Footnote 8
For over 35 hours during my first year and about 10 hours during my second, I co-taught the MCE class. Since I was not able to take notes while actively teaching, I had to wait for the teachers to resume instruction before jotting down observations, which sometimes made transcriptions difficult. Beyond teaching, I assisted in organizing bake sales and poster-making activities, coordinated with the NGOs that visited the class, and took part in various GiG events. I also conducted 12 interviews with current or former GiG staff, and two biographical interviews with each teacher, focusing on their training, teaching practices, and views on student engagement. The article grants a significant importance to teachers’ beliefs about the program. I do not contend that these discourses are representative of the views of teachers in all elite schools or of the dynamics in all public schools. Rather, that their beliefs highly influenced what I observed. The full pedagogical autonomy of French public school teachers means they can decide how they want to teach. Even when confronted with a ready-to-use program such as GiG, their own beliefs about inequality and the role of children in solving them, among others, were crucial in determining which course material we used and what kind of discussions we decided to set up. Yet I show that the teachers’ emphasis on participation and the “common good” is a widespread feature of moral and civic education nowadays. Therefore, while their views are not representative, they embody some of the changes underway in public schools today.
Additionally, I designed a 69-question survey, administered to the 42 students we taught to. The survey explored their cultural practices, philanthropic involvement, attitudes toward school, and future aspirations. Developed after several months of immersion at Leclerc, the survey can be considered ethnographic in nature as it reflected themes that emerged during my fieldwork. I also focused on mitigating children’s tendency to answer surveys like tests [Barker and Weller Reference Barker and Weller2003] by making explicit that this was a “game”—a common strategy in childhood research. I let them know the teacher would not be reading their answers, and more generally adopted a relaxed, friendly attitude with them with the aim of collecting more genuine answers. I chose the survey format as it was not possible to conduct in-depth interviews with children in such a setting. Parents had become wary of this class—especially after we invited a politically active marine wildlife conservation NGO to participate—and I feared that requesting interviews would jeopardize my continued access.
The survey results confirm that children belonged to the economic bourgeoisie, with 54% of children declaring they lived in a place owned by their parents.Footnote 9 42% of them were born in Paris or in affluent suburbs (predominantly Neuilly-sur-Seine) and many were born abroad when their parents were expatriates. Parents’ occupations included CEOs (Respondent 14), banker (R2), editor (R9), geoscience engineer (R17) or lawyer (R32). 88% of them participated in extracurricular activities with very diverse involvements in classical music (harp), dance (ballet), but also various sports like BMX, canoeing or judo. Half of the 5th graders confided they would attend the public middle school next to Leclerc, and about 25% said they would attend a private middle school (e.g. Stanislas in the 6th arrondissement or La Légion d’Honneur, a public school reserved for recipients of the French order of merit). These figures confirm, at the children’s level, that the surroundings of Leclerc (Ternes, South-East 17th) are populated by the SBE, the economic bourgeoisie. Among this averagely privileged group, some children were much less affluent and some faced economic hardship. Elias and Farah, whom I describe later, were among the only children we can consider “disadvantaged” and among the only non-white children. However, their presence was important because it reflected the theoretical openness of public schools to all.
From social closure to privilege management
Scholars have paid scant attention to the role of MCE in reproducing class hierarchies [Haegel Reference Haegel2020]. While a number of studies have examined the ambiguous effects of MCE in underprivileged schools [Feldman et al. Reference Feldman, Pasek, Romer and Jamieson2007], far fewer have considered MCE as a tool for reshaping privilege in elite public institutions. In urban settings, public institutions are targeted by upper-classes looking for the “local school” [Raveaud and Van Zanten Reference Raveaud and Van Zanten2007]. “Social closure” seems to be very prevalent in such urban public schools [Van Zanten Reference Van Zanten2003; Reference Van Zanten, Apple, Ball and Gandin2009: 329]. In Paris specifically, these mechanisms of social closure are mostly due to residential segregation [Berends Reference Berends2015; Blanchard and Cayouette-Remblière Reference Blanchard and Cayouette-Remblière2011; Héran Reference Héran1996].
While parents actively pursue these mechanisms of closure, economic elites also want to raise “good kids” [Sherman Reference Sherman2017] and portray them as morally upright [Lamont Reference Lamont1992; Sayer Reference Sayer2005], shedding the appearance of what Khan [Reference Khan2011] calls “entitlement”—the feeling of being owed both attention and economic resources. Distancing representation of “spoiled kids” [Higgins Reference Higgins2022] helps reframe wealth as potentially helpful to others [McGoey Reference Mcgoey2012] and therefore justifies its accumulation. The making of wealthy yet responsible children is a moral process in which parents, teachers and children themselves draw boundaries [Lamont Reference Lamont1992; Lamont and Molnár Reference Lamont and Molnár2002] between the “good” and the “bad” rich; a “legitimate” and “illegitimate” philanthropic action; a “deserving” or “undeserving” poor. In a Weberian fashion, wealth accumulation and patterns of wealth redistribution are always tied, and dependent upon moral concerns. This process of learning to give extends beyond acts of giving money or goods and includes cultivating “durable dispositions toward generosity” that help transform schools into spaces where “the tacit rule of the game is that giving is good” [Bourdieu (1993) Reference Bourdieu2017].Footnote 10 In essence, it encompasses all the subtle ways elites are socialized into acting in a more benevolent manner.
To understand the relation between elites and moral worth, Scully et al. [Reference Scully, Rothenberg, Beaton and Tang2018] have introduced the concept of “privilege work” to describe how progressive heirs adjust emotionally to more “ordinary” or disadvantaged people. Privilege work involves an engagement with the structural roots of inequality, something that PE does very little. I propose that PE is better understood as a case of privilege management. I define this process as the strategies elites employ to show, hide, or adjust their privilege depending on the social context. Elites effectively “manage” privilege as an asset, choosing to reveal or conceal it—for example, acting selfishly with peers but responsibly with authority figures, like teachers. I argue that privilege management features two processes, building upon Sherman’s [Reference Sherman2017] typology of elite parenting practices. The first mechanism is exposure—encouraging children to become aware of the world around them and of their own privileged position, as argued by Sherman. I introduce a second process, that of intervention—how children are encouraged to take action and engage with social issues.
Privilege management has an important gender component. More particularly, the intersection of gender and elite socializations is crucial [Khan Reference Khan2012] because it is unclear how this relation is affected by philanthropic education. Lareau [Reference Lareau2003] also uses the concept of “entitlement” in a different sense from Khan—as pointed out by Sherman [Reference Sherman2017]—to describe how boys feel able to speak up in various contexts, including the classroom where they interact in a “flattened” way with teachers [Taylor Reference Taylor2021; Calarco Reference Calarco2018]. In Lareau’s sense, entitlement refers to a sense of agency, while it is used directly in relation to family wealth in Khan’s sense. Boys also tend to express greater political ambition and deeper interest in politics than girls [Bos et al. Reference Bos, Holman, Greenlee, Oxley and Lay2020] while showcasing greater acceptance of social inequality [Pratto, Stallworth and Sidanius Reference Pratto, Stallworth and Sidanius1997]. With this framework in mind, we could hypothesize that boys would be more at ease in performing class privilege. On the other hand, girls’ early socializations would seem to favor their ease with philanthropic classes: Inglehart and Norris [Reference Inglehart and Norris2003], for instance, argue that girls’ early socialization to communal and nurturing roles [Campbell and Winters Reference Campbell and Winters2008] contributes to their greater political support for social welfare, healthcare, and policies promoting equality. These dimensions would lead us to hypothesize that girls could be at ease with philanthropic causes because they have been socialized into many of its moral principles. Yet, because philanthropy involves both elite socializations and this concern for “others,” it is unclear what the outcome might be in terms of ease, and how “new repertoires of entitlement” [Higgins Reference Higgins2022: 1279] are formed as part of philanthropic education.
Contributions and findings
With regards to the sociology of elite socializations, this article asks: how is philanthropic education turned into a privileged ease?
Findings indicate that philanthropic education, while cultivating children’s “awareness,” works through a series of boundary-making processes, as is shown in the first part. The way upper-class children are socialized into philanthropy does not correspond to “opening” practices but rather to “sensitizing” practices of privilege management that do not question the nature of privilege. Exposure replaces social opening. Through peer interactions, discussions with teachers and volunteers, students develop a privileged stance of what inequality looks like and how it should be remedied. Ease is the result of this “inequality talk” [Brook, O’Brien and Taylor Reference Brook, O’brien and Taylor2021]. This stance is also a moral one, as shown in the connection between GiG and the historical development of moral education in France (“Philanthropy as Moral Education”). Such resources are very powerful because they undermine criticism of wealth. Teaching “awareness” from very early on makes elites less vulnerable to criticisms of entitlement à la Khan, training benevolent and good-willed economic elites. This benevolent face [Goffman (1967) Reference Goffman2005; Gaztambide-Fernández and Howard Reference Gaztambide-Fernández and Howard2013] is an important feature of privilege management.
I also contend that the content of philanthropic socializations at Leclerc is deeply gendered (“Performing ease”). Patterns of interventions, in the second part, vary according to whether they are performed by boys or girls: it appears that girls manage privilege through a belief in the philanthropic outcome of their action while boys express more cynicism and bend toward accumulation.
I eventually discuss the implications of the rise of philanthropic education for political socializations and how children’s social imaginaries are shaped by this education. The mechanisms of philanthropic education also raise questions about new forms of entitlement and the role of philanthropy in the cultural reproduction of economic elites.
Philanthropy as moral education
From moral and civic to philanthropic education
Recent state initiatives in France have linked education with philanthropy. In 2020, two members of parliament presented a report to the then Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, advocating for a distinctly “French model of philanthropy.”Footnote 11 While most of their 35 recommendations focused on tax and legal matters, six specifically addressed “education to philanthropy and its valuation.”
This push was supported by the Ministry of Education itself. In 2019, Education Minister Gabriel Attal visited a class of 5th graders whose “favorite class was philanthropy.”Footnote 12 Later, in 2023, the French Ministry of Education officially supported the Giving Tuesday initiative alongside GiG. The report on Giving Tuesday reads: “Education and engagement bear similar values such as opening to others, empathy or promises for the future. In this context, [the public] school appears as the institution most inclined to promote the development of tomorrow’s citizens.” While “philanthropy” was “triumphant” after the Revolution and under Napoleon Bonaparte, it progressively disappeared in the 19th century, critiqued by worker organizations and replaced by “solidarity” [Gautier Reference Gautier2019]. How did it come back? What led to public schools taking on this dual role of not only developing citizens but also cultivating future philanthropists? And how did GiG become a legitimate organization to do so?
Civic education was initiated during the 3rd Republic, as an alternative to the Church’s moral education [Déloye Reference Déloye1994: 121; Loeffel Reference Loeffel, Denis and Kahn2003]. Following the 1882 law of compulsory, free, and secular schooling, civic education expanded rapidly [Mougniotte Reference Mougniotte1991], supplementing history and geography lessons, teaching children about “society foundations,” “human needs,” and “political organization” [Bensoussan and Laugère Reference Bensoussan and Laugère1985].
By 1923, civic education merged with moral education on the basis that “democratic institutions rely upon moral ideas, ideas of justice and solidarity.”Footnote 13 Republican reformers managed to take back moral education to public schools. The class started to incorporate children’s lived experiences into the curriculum, fostering a culture of legal obedience and secular regard for others. This method presented the advantage of making the learning of empathy accessible. As Godin and Salesse note: The practical initiation to civic life is the application of moral education […]. In many schools, students have already learned about social life by participating in cooperatives.Footnote 14 These are things you can see, touch […]. The teaching is not theoretical but with evidence in hand [as cited in Marchand Reference Marchand1992: 28]. This approach echoed emerging developmental psychology, such as Jean Piaget’s advocacy for “experiential learning” in a conference on “The spirit of solidarity in children and international cooperation” [(1931) Reference Piaget2011: 74], highlighting the desire to include as many students as possible. The “laws of social life,” according to Piaget, were deemed to be found by students at school or at home but in their own actions, by themselves.
By the late 1960s, school curricula had started to target financial education [Clerc Reference Clerc2024], and MCE became somewhat outdated. The class was discontinued after May 1968. Ideals of individual autonomy contradicted the traditional moral education curriculum [Douniès Reference Douniès2021]. This led to MCE being progressively set aside in public school curricula. In the 1970s and 1980s, amid concerns about the “social divide” and rising inequality, the course was revived as “education to citizenship” [Galichet Reference Galichet2005], with similar emphasis on immediate, concrete experiences. “Moral and civic education” as such was reintroduced in 2013 and contemporary laws stem from this moment [Degenne Reference Degenne Isabelle2015].
Key aspects of MCE’s historical development can be found in the GiG program. This adequacy is no coincidence: it was purposefully constructed by the nonprofit organization. The “experiential” method, the focus on student participation, as well as the merging of moral values with civic ones are pedagogical evolutions recycled by GiG, whose founder claims that “education to empathy must find its way in schools” something that MCE already participates in.
Yet GiG also shifts away from the traditional MCE curriculum by offering not only empathy but “philanthropy” as an answer to the social divide and growing inequality. It aims at legitimizing philanthropy in France by socializing students to its practice. As explained by Jeremy, the program’s head, a man who serves on the board of many educational curricula:
We do not prevent any school from participating, but what we try to do is deconstruct the idea that philanthropy is for the people on the good side of the social ladder. There is a whole category of the French population, especially in those “priority education networks”, trapped in the role of welfare recipients […].GiG arrives and says “It is not your role in society; you have a role to play, and you can go to the ‘Restos du Coeur’Footnote 15 and collect food for your classmates.” GiG is a tool in the fight against the inequity of opportunities.
In other words, Jeremy intends to counter the idea that only the “wealthy give” [Ostrower Reference Ostrower1997]—a conception inspired by similar North American curricula such as “Common Cents” in New York City and “Youth and Philanthropy Initiative” in Canada. Yet, by focusing on the legitimacy of philanthropy, Jeremy steers the GiG approach away from one of MCE’s historical components, that of éducation populaire—popular education—a regrettable shift according to several people I interviewed, including Emilie, a 32-year-old former employee who claimed that “solidarity takes place in disadvantaged neighborhoods first […], not in the 16th [arrondissement].” But for Sylvie and Emelyne, the two teachers I assisted, it was important to teach awareness in elite settings. They did so by mobilizing moral arguments about wealth and philanthropy. I now turn to this issue.
An “awareness campaign”: unfolding exposure practices in upper-class settings
When I first arrived at Leclerc, Sylvie, a well-dressed and cheerful 5th-grade teacher who had recently joined the school after spending eight years in priority education networks, welcomed me to the teachers’ room.Footnote 16 She expressed excitement about our project and reminded me of her initial impressions of working with “pretty privileged” students. In our interview, later in the year, she contrasted her current job with her former one in which she was also a “therapist, social worker, educator”. Like other teachers with seniority in French public schools, working at Leclerc was a career advancement, and she could now focus on her core task: teaching. She hoped to make her new students more aware and sensitive to inequality. Over a cup of coffee, I introduced myself and GiG to the other teachers in the room. Most of them were supportive and thought the program would be critically useful. A senior teacher who had spent more than twenty years at Leclerc grinned: “These kids nowadays […] They’re stuck in their own shoes, selfish to the marrow. We don’t do solidarity anymore.” The Head of School jokingly called me “Mr. Solidarity.” “We’ll see about that!” I said.
Emelyne, a 4th grade teacher at Leclerc, was older and frequently exhausted. Like Sylvie, she had taught in what she described as “challenging” environments and noticed a stark contrast in behaviors: students at Leclerc were quiet and well-behaved. Emelyne had experience with solidarity projects, including organizing second-hand clothing and bake sales. While she was skeptical about the transformative potential of such initiatives, she believed they could at least foster awareness. She told me it was not the first time she hosted a philanthropic program in the school:
[The second-hand store volunteer] had explained that the circular economy could make clothes more accessible. She told students that while clothes might not mean much to them, they could be crucial for others. Well… My students will never buy clothes second-hand anyway, but at least they know it exists.
Emelyne saw GiG as a way of increasing awareness. This process is what I call exposure, drawing on Sherman [Reference Sherman2017]. She analyzes such practices as strategies to “locate the self” and find a sense of appropriate privilege. Crucial here is the fact that choosing the public school can already be a choice of exposure, for parents who believe such schools offer social diversity [Sherman Reference Sherman2017: 23]. Yet, as argued by Raveaud and Van Zanten, this choice of exposure is often the argument of upper-classes looking for limited social diversity [Raveaud and Van Zanten Reference Raveaud and Van Zanten2007]. By focusing on classroom settings, I show that exposure is not only provided by parental discourse (Sherman) or the school environment (Van Zanten), but that it is explicitly targeted by teachers who consider promoting awareness as part of their jobs.
For Sylvie and Emelyne, teaching awareness was also a moral task. Both drew strong boundaries between the type of exposure they had benefitted from in their experiences of philanthropy programs. Sylvie, for example, recalled that, as a child, she had never understood why she was selling cakes:
As a child, it was more like: Mom, you’ve got to buy glue or pens for the class. What I am trying to say is that we knew that we were collecting money or food for some reason, but we were not involved in the choice. There was not this thing that I try to teach to my class like: you do it. […] I think that what matters is to be involved. I think that’s essential.
As we see in this part of the interview, Sylvie indicates that the kind of philanthropic endeavors she experienced were not meaningful and explains why she thinks awareness starts by doing things. Similarly, Emelyne did not believe genuine awareness was a simple thing. Describing previous actions undertaken at Leclerc, she said:
We do bake sales, but they are not necessarily for an NGO, they are not philanthropic. These sales, they’re not for the outside, they help in organizing class outings. The parents are quite generous here. When I came in for the first time, they did lots of class outings. But for me, this is not philanthropy. I think, there’s very little philanthropy in what we do.
Emelyne was constantly worried that there would be “little philanthropy in what we d[id].” She always used philanthropy in the etymological sense, as the “love of humankind,”, a definition that GiG also used in its textbooks—far from the common understanding of philanthropy in France as a (rare) elite practice.
These excerpts tend to indicate that exposure is a moral task undertaken by teachers, associated with their own beliefs of what philanthropy is and what should and could be done with 10-year-old children. The conception of exposure at Leclerc favors a privileged ease in that it tackles the “anxiety” that children may grow up “entitled,” “spoiled” [Higgins Reference Higgins2022; Sherman Reference Sherman2018] without any conception of solidarity. In the following lines, I dive into the fabric of “awareness” at school, focusing on the entanglement of elite fabric and morality.
Talking about social others
Discussions about children’s own privilege were rare and we focused instead on making them aware of others. One early exception came when I showed a short video that is part of GiG’s handbook entitled, Why Are There Very Rich and Very Poor People?Footnote 17 It sparked a brief exchange about belonging to the “1 percent,” but was more effective in launching discussion about the causes of poverty, overlooking the connection. This reflects a key feature of privilege management: awareness emerges not from self-examination but from learning about others. As Gaztambide-Fernández and Howard’s [Reference Gaztambide-Fernández and Howard2013] put it, “[the students’] sense of what it means to be normal is reflected back through an oblique recognition of other people’s suffering.” I now turn to the relation between “recognition” of others and class-based boundary-making processes [Lamont Reference Lamont1992].
Far-away examples monopolized many of our discussions. Maximilien, a blond, curly-haired child, chose to speak about poverty and exclusion. He pinned a poster of a deprived child looking sad and resigned standing in front of a pile of trash:
Look at this child. He lives in the trash, it’s unfair. I would like to help him with that. Also, look. The people around him walk barefoot, they do not have shoes. Sometimes, they need to walk up to ten kilometers to get water.
Maximilien’s speech proved highly effective: other students uttered “Ahs” and “Ohs.” Emelyne explained that such situations are not likely to be found close by; it would therefore be difficult for the class to help people like that, but that there were other ways to help. In another session, a volunteer discussed war trauma. Leïla described a video she had seen about refugees:
Children were so traumatized that they were scared of birds when they flew over their heads. They thought they could drop bombs.
Talking about children suffering elsewhere tended to generate strong emotional reactions, and all the children wanted to give their opinion. Discussing distant “others” seemed to stir their sense of injustice. Students frequently asked what they could do to help, only to hear that these problems were beyond their control—these boundaries were often drawn by teachers themselves, who explained that it was not possible to solve all the earth’s problems.
Some topics like access to culture were closer to the social experience of Leclerc’s students but no topic sparked more discussions than the environment, which the children decided to take up through a concrete initiative, with a marine wildlife conservation NGO. This came as no surprise, neither to a volunteer who said upper-class children always “knew what they [were] talking about,” nor to Sylvie who told me that the “environment was a major concern [for the children].” When the NGO volunteers visited the class, they witnessed this heightened environmental concern firsthand. My fieldnotes indicate:
Students respond promptly to the volunteer’s questions. One of the girls Sylvie identifies as the “best” in the class mentions Cap Ferret as a place where she saw several species of fishes the organization intends to rescue. Sylvie is proud of her class, she looks at me with bright eyes: “no wonder they know about this!”, referencing the one-week nature class in Britanny. The students debate over how they could save the seal stuck in fishing nets. The two volunteers, wearing a grey sweatshirt with the organization’s signature logo, confide to Sylvie and me: “these kids know everything, they’re experts on this seal question!”
In this excerpt, the moral concerns of both teachers and volunteers seem to merge perfectly. To both Sylvie and the NGO representatives, the environment appeared as a “natural” fit for children. These discourses highlighted moral claims about what topics these children should tackle—and what topics they shouldn’t. That selection of topics has important implications for the issues these children may want to address in their future philanthropy. While GiG was meant to “open children’s eyes,” their exposure was often limited to one or two topics because of teacher preferences or due to the lack of time. Topic selection was also shaped by the nonprofit organizations that partnered with GiG: six out of forty organizations were devoted to animal welfare, five focused on international solidarity, nine were dedicated to helping the poor and none to political refugees.
The children already had a rooted understanding of homelessness, knew what “SDF” (sans domicile fixe) meant, and 66% reported having already given a coin to someone in the street. Our classroom discussions used a cartoon picturing children choosing between buying candy or giving the money to a homeless man with a dog. Sylvie often reminded them, “Two euros may not mean much to you, but they can be of great help to someone else.” These conversations also revealed how their parents had already shaped their responses to homelessness:
One girl at the back of the class says that her mother told her to give food rather than money to homeless persons because they could buy cigarettes with the money. Sylvie answers: “And what if they have already eaten?” I try to explain that we cannot decide what someone else needs without asking them. With a smile, I ask the girl at the back what she would do if the person was vegetarian. “Or vegan!”, adds Sylvie. The girl does not answer. Her classmate whispers, annoyed: “Still, that’s better for their health.”
This example sheds light on the intersection between familial injunctions and the classroom setup but also shows that children start to formulate such moral statements on their own (“That’s better for their health”). Beyond depicting “the poor” as beggars in need [Simmel (1908) Reference Simmel1965: 140], these scenes of exposure reveal that offering help is never neutral: it is embedded in specific forms of assistance that express the giver’s moral posture.
During these discussions of distant and local inequalities, the children eventually confronted social distance within their own classroom. Unprepared, Elias came to the board and described how his family nearly faced eviction by their landlord because of their Muslim faith. His story stunned his classmates, who responded, “It’s so unfair,” much as they had when learning about Maximilien’s story. Elias, among the least privileged in the class, was offered only distant empathy by his peers who did not approach him afterward. He was followed by Farah—who, other than being one of the least socially endowed children, also faced racism from classmates—seizing the occasion created by Elias’ discourse. She recounted how one friend refused to give a toy to another because she was a Christian. Farah then mumbled the names of other students at Leclerc—including one named Victoria—who bullied others because of their religion. Emelyne responded:
Victoria? Well, it would be great to make posters about this. But Farah… I don’t want any names here, I don’t want names on the board. If you have issues with someone, we can talk about it in private, but this is not what MCE is about.
Again, Emelyne drew strong boundaries between what was possible to say and to do in the class; and appeared to think that personal matters were not to be discussed during class time. The broader public school culture of non-discrimination and “blindness” to religion and race may help explain this statement, while revealing what Emelyne perceives as “doable” and “fair” in this situation. Eventually, children voted to act for the environment, not “human rights.”
This analysis suggests that exposure is oriented in a moral way at Leclerc, and that this moral compass draws boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate philanthropy, between what children can or cannot do with homeless people and how they should address or not their classmates’ difficult situations. These boundaries contradict the “social opening” mission of GiG and favor the analysis in terms of exposure and sensitizing I have developed. Three main consequences emerge. The first (1) is that, in line with MCE, GiG is a “moral enterprise” [Becker (1963) Reference Becker1973] seeking to legitimize philanthropic practices in France. Moreover (2), it appears that exposure sparks a sense of injustice among children at Leclerc, almost immediately voiced into a discourse on injustice which reflects some of the moral stances that philanthropy enacts—including, but not restricted to, the unequal relation between the charity recipient and the giver. This discourse overshadows inequality within the classroom. Finally (3), exposure appears to have strong effects in fueling children’s entitlement (à la Lareau) to take action.
Philanthropic education does not only teach children how to think. It also teaches them how to act for change. It aims to make children active at their own scale, and cultivates what I call interventions in the social world. The following section discusses the nature and gendered deployment of these interventions.
Performing ease: children’s interventions at Leclerc
Playing philanthropists
On a November morning, Emelyne decided to reshuffle the class setting to foster greater engagement. During another discussion about homelessness, she proposed staging a play where some students would act as homeless people while others would play themselves. All the children volunteered to take on the role of the unhoused. Three short plays followed. In each, the students portraying the unhoused sat on the ground, pleading for help from their peers. The children’s reactions grew more animated with each performance. Initially shy, one student exaggerated their response when receiving an imaginary item from the others, which sent the class into fits of laughter. I wrote down:
In a third scene, Emelyne instructs one of the two students to ignore the unhoused individual. The child steps away from their friend and pretends to leave the room. The remaining student hesitates for a moment, then decides to offer an imaginary coin to the student playing the role of the unhoused person. The latter responds with a prayer-like “thanks,” delivered in an accent that was not their own.
Such scenes became frequent that year, given the success of this little play. Later in the school year, I was invited to speak at a GiG workshop attended by its founders, teachers, and other volunteers. I sat alongside a volunteer I had met before and a doctor in neuropsychology who had recently published an article on “prosocial behavior and altruism” in children. She spoke first, emphasizing that both prosocial behavior and altruism should be fostered early and nurtured through “routinized engagement.” She argued that the program could encourage social action “without expecting anything in return.”
These two examples show, in different ways, how GiG fosters the idea that the children’s voice matters and that they need to intervene in the social world. Such practices are what I call interventions, adding to Sherman’s [Reference Sherman2017] framework of constraint and exposure. Drawing on sociologists of childhood [Corsaro and Eder Reference Corsaro and Eder1990], they refer to how children reuse exposure in practice, and how they voice their concerns, approval or resistance to what they are being taught. Interventions are also cultivated at the level of everyday practices, as a form of “routinized engagement”—not as a once-in-a-lifetime kind of philanthropy. As shown with the history of French MCE, this is nothing new. However, citizenship education scholars tend to rely mostly on literal interpretation of curricula rather than looking at their unfolding in the classroom [Haegel Reference Haegel2020], which leads us to think that programs are systematically implemented in the way they are designed.
Such interventions range from simple questions in the classroom to how children talk about the class in the playground. In this study, they are restricted to the school setting but they also unfold elsewhere: the philanthropy curriculum designs them to have an impact “outside” school. Yet interventions are not a mere rehearsal of the moral script of philanthropy; they also reflect the development of children’s views on inequality, as we saw in the first philanthropic “play” they were asked to improvise. In other cases, like the discussion on food and homelessness, they did not fully conform to Sylvie’s moral expectations—“Still, that’s better for their health”—or impose the frameworks they were provided within their families.
Interventions matter because the range of children’s reactions was much wider than I expected. As I entered Leclerc, I thought they would behave appropriately as “little philanthropists,” “playing the game” of philanthropy. Overall, most of them identified with recognizable forms of philanthropy—usually the ones we had identified in class. Two-thirds of the students reported they had already given a coin to an unhoused individual, making it the most recognizable “philanthropic” action. For 14 students, giving money was considered the best way to help, followed closely by giving food or items, which was chosen by 13 students. “Giving time” (volunteering) or “giving a smile,” were each selected by 5 students.
Yet it can hardly be said that they all identified with the same moral stances of philanthropy. In the survey, 37 out of 42 students reported they had not known what philanthropy was before the class, and this understanding had not significantly improved by the end of the year. Amandine, another teacher I interviewed, noted that fewer than 10 of her 24 students could explain concepts like philanthropy or empathy after the implementation of the program. Among the respondents, 29 children said the class had not changed their beliefs.Footnote 18 Many struggled to answer questions about empathy and philanthropy, often raising their hands uncertainly while filling out the survey. Other than the environment, their “expertise” appeared somewhat limited. That children did not really know what philanthropy was came as no surprise to a volunteer in the program, who had also been involved in curriculum-making:
We don’t teach the kids that much. We just teach them to draw from different sources and set up projects. But the project isn’t the end goal—it’s an educational tool packed with various lessons. Some teachers were disappointed, saying, “That’s all we did?” It’s not that we don’t care about the project, but we don’t care that much. Footnote 19
When I asked the volunteer what GiG was for, she said it was just a “means” to foster children’s interventions. “GiG helps them with the confidence that they can do something,” she said. In other words, it provided them with the ability, the entitlement (à la Lareau) to intervene—ideally, in line with the program’s goals. Yet the laughter that followed the short play reveals an important dimension of the children’s interventions: the possibility that they had not fully internalized the moral dimension of philanthropy—in other words, that the socialization process may have been unsuccessful. As argued in the introduction, privilege management relies on a form of face work—a performance of care, empathy, and benevolence. At least, this is what is expected from children’s exposure. But what happens when that face slips, and children act like “spoiled kids?” What happens when children’s interventions reveal irony, detachment, or even resistance?
How philanthropic interventions shape gendered repertoires of entitlement
At Leclerc, boys often challenged selflessness when they were given time to speak up or when they intervened. In the classroom, their interventions were often aimed at showing that they did not really like the moral stance of philanthropy, or that they simply did not care. For example, Mathieu—whose parents work as an editor and a lawyer—contested a volunteer’s remark that “everyone can recycle,” arguing that this was not the case for him:
My mother, she’s a real Parisian. She would never put a compost bin on the balcony. It is how it is; I too am a real Parisian.
Mathieu’s intervention contrasts with other virtuous reactions. He had a good relationship with Sylvie and understood he could make jokes without being punished––she often laughed at his jokes. He also took that same freedom with me when filling out his questionnaire—a freedom that recalls Taylor’s [Reference Taylor2021] ease in teacher-student hierarchies in elite settings:
Victor: Does anyone have questions?
Mathieu: [fakes not having a question, then intervenes] I do! If I gave a binder sheet to my neighbor, is that a philanthropic act? [other children chuckle]
Victor: You tell me!
Mathieu knew that I wouldn’t consider his binder sheet as a philanthropic act. He also knew that Sylvie had defined philanthropy as something that makes a difference for others.Footnote 20 He explicitly distorted the boundaries we had drawn. Mathieu was far from the only one to do so. Gabriel before him, when talking about homelessness and the relationship between a homeless person and his dog, had asked, “Why doesn’t he sell the dog?”—with great success and laughter among his classmates.
These interventions challenged one of the moral compasses of our philanthropy class: selflessness. Boys were more likely than girls to (1) talk about money in their interventions and (2) to show interest in accumulation rather than philanthropic spending. They were looking at the other side of the puzzle, that where philanthropy is preceded by economic accumulation—a part that we had cautiously left aside with Sylvie and Emelyne. While the program framed money as a means (among others) to achieve a collective project, these boys valued money in itself. For instance, after a discussion about organizing a charity race, I walked out with Gabriel and Mathieu. They ran around the playground for a while before coming back to me. I asked if they wanted to participate in the charity race. “I’m lazy!” Gabriel replied. To encourage them, I suggested they could collect money for each lap they ran around the playground. Both eagerly ran three laps before returning to claim their reward. When I explained that the money would go to the marine wildlife NGO, Gabriel seemed disappointed. “No… I wanted the money for myself, not for the others!” he said. Similarly, in the classroom, boys were particularly eager to talk about money, often mentioning how much they had in their bank accounts. In the survey, they also consistently overestimated their monthly allowances: 63% of the students who claimed to receive more than 40 euros per month were boys, with some reporting unrealistically high amounts. After Sylvie and I announced that we had raised nearly 700 euros for the NGO, a usually quiet child approached me in the corridor and remarked that he would have preferred to use the money to buy a Porsche.
Such interventions indicate that boys used a different approach to money as a way to resist PE. They reframed it as an end in itself, contradicting that it was only a “means.” Consciously or unconsciously, they were asserting that they knew they were wealthy and wanted to show it. In Emelyne’s class, while reflecting on housing issues, one front-row student struggled to grasp how unemployment could lead to homelessness, and intervened: “They could always rent their apartment!” Emelyne had to explain that not everyone owns an apartment. In the same fashion, Carl said he did not know how to answer the questionnaire when it asked, “Do your parents own the place where you live?”
Actually, I live in an apartment block (immeuble entier) that my family owns. What should I write down?
These remarks tend to show entitlement (in Khan’s sense this time), as a feeling of greater right and access to economic resources. They seem to reflect what Sparks calls a “sense of expansion” specific to boys’ elite education [Reference Sparks2018]. PE often became a conveyor of such an expansion. However, one must not overestimate how “selfish” and ironic boys were. These interventions are also closely related to boys’ peer cultures valuing detachment as well as group dynamics of mocking [Martin Reference Martin1998; Pugh Reference Pugh2009; Thorne (1983) Reference Thorne2024]. In responding to the survey, Gabriel and Mathieu both described themselves as “very empathetic” and actively participated in creating posters for the bake sale. In other words, they participated when they wanted to. This discrepancy is at the heart of what I have called privilege management, which emphasizes the ability to shift between “repertoires of entitlement.”
Girls, both in and outside the classroom, tended to engage with different aspects of the program. They showed less resistance than boys, and their interventions reflected stronger adherence to PE moral principles. During a press review session, Fanny, raising her hand as high as she could, exclaimed, “This kid makes my heart beat,” while describing a picture of a deprived child surrounded by trash. Later, with a group of friends, she asked who I worked for. When I explained that I was a volunteer and wasn’t being paid, she reflected:
That’s good. When you’ve spoken to all the classes, the parents will tell their bosses, who will talk among themselves, then to people in their restaurants, and even to Macron. Everything will get better.
Such remarks are revealing, especially since they formulate a child-like view of the world: parents/bosses/people in restaurants/Macron. Girls like Fanny seemed to believe that their philanthropic efforts could make a difference, or at least demonstrated that they cared about the program’s outcomes. Their relationship to money was also very different: they seemed to believe that money was a means to achieve something else, not an end in itself. This was visible in Emelyne’s class when Anne reacted to the issue of access to healthcare:
There are more and more people who cannot get vaccinated because they do not have enough money. They stay in bad health. In the street, I’ve seen people trying to get in a hospital where I was going to see the doctor, and the doctor wouldn’t let them in because they didn’t have enough money to pay.
Emelyne quickly responded that she did not think Anne’s interpretation was accurate, since vaccines are free in France. Still, Anne’s comment is revealing for two reasons: first, it tends to show that she understood money as a key factor in accessing healthcare, not as an end in itself; second, it suggests that she overinterpreted what she observed, filtering it through the moral lens of the GiG program. It is unlikely that doctors were turning patients away but Anne had internalized the moral lesson of the class which can be phrased as follows: “some people lack access to healthcare, and this is both unfair and ethically wrong.” A similar pattern emerged during the bake sale, the centerpiece of their philanthropic intervention: while most boys were eager to sell cakes, girls were more engaged in making posters to promote the event to other classes.
Girls also performed a privileged ease. It was only performed in a different way, closer to what Le Wita describes as “self-control” [Reference Le Wita2015]. Rather than asserting privilege as boys did, they tainted their interventions with hints about their privilege. “It’s so unfair” types of reactions were widespread among them, but their experiences often reflected an “appropriate privilege,” as Sherman [Reference Sherman2017] calls it. The long discussions on refugees we had following the conflicts in the Middle East helped decipher this pattern: girls tended to show understanding of why refugees would need a new place to stay—which was not necessarily the case for boys—and they often virtually offered to host them in their holiday homes in La Baule or Le Cap Ferret. The sincerity they developed was deeply coupled with their privilege, rather than questioning it.
Socialization to selflessness appears significantly more effective with girls. This difference likely stems in part from masculine peer norms that devalue expressions of care and emotional involvement [Diter Reference Diter2015] as well as challenge mere obedience in schools [Raby Reference Raby2012]. However, it also reflects gendered patterns in how children are taught to understand and relate to money [Clerc Reference Clerc2024; Zelizer (1994) Reference Zelizer2021]. Specifically, it appears that boys and girls have different ways of dealing with their privilege. Boys were not at ease with PE because it seemed to challenge their performance of privilege, while it was aligned with girls’ previous socializations.
Conclusion and discussion
Can awareness of other people’s suffering sound “cool”? [Swalwell Reference Swalwell2013: 5]. At Leclerc, such suffering was turned into educational material, offering a clear contrast with students’ own lives. However, the program did not explicitly address this contrast; instead, it facilitated ways of navigating the distance between students and those they aimed to help. This is what I have called privilege management.
I have argued that this navigation, or privilege management, involved both demonstrating care and, at times, deliberately withholding it. Managing this distance became a form of “face work.” Students learned to engage with adults as colleagues or peers rather than as authority figures, while also interacting with their peers on issues such as inequality, social justice, and solidarity. These findings echo Taylor’s [Reference Taylor2021] “flattened” teacher-student interactions. In the end, ease appeared as a distinctive disposition for both boys and girls but in a different way. Boys were not at ease with the moral stance of GiG and found ways to restore their entitlement to economic resources. Girls were more successful in managing their privilege with the help of philanthropic education.
Such findings open new discussions about entitlement. With the rise of programs similar to GiG in France, Europe and North America,Footnote 21 this study helps understand the mixed effects philanthropic education has on privilege. The concept of privilege management allows us to think about entitlement and privilege (à la Khan) as two sides of the repertoires of changing elites. This study shows that “giving,” which complements “owning” for children growing in the economic bourgeoisie, provides evidence of both concern for others and boundary-making processes. Entitlement as an ability to take action and discuss one’s views (à la Lareau) and entitlement as an “individual psychological sense of excessive deservingness” [Sherman Reference Sherman2020; Khan Reference Khan2011] may sometimes be aligned (in boys’ case) and sometimes not (for girls). This reframes Khan’s claim that “new elites” do not use entitlement as a sense of economic deservedness, because philanthropy rests upon this naturalization of inequality and immunizes wealth from criticism. The gendered discrepancy exposed in this article advances the debate by showing that entitlement à la Lareau and entitlement à la Khan might actually be two sides of the same coin of socialization to privilege, just like learning to give complements “learning to own” [Kuusela Reference Kuusela2018]. Entitlement must therefore be thought of as a repertoire that elites learn to juggle with, and this competence is what I have called privilege management. Future research should expand on this idea by situating philanthropic education within these “new repertoires of entitlement” [Higgins Reference Higgins2022], in order to evaluate if this argument can be extended to other schools and situations other than those of an elite Parisian public school. We need comparative studies of philanthropy classes to know where and how philanthropic education restores entitlement and where it attempts to “bridge” children’s background altogether. In future studies, the connection with family wealth should be made clear so that we understand better the role of schools in transforming narratives of privilege.
Philanthropic education might also be a resource directly useful in school curricula. The focus on extracurricular skills and volunteering experience in high schools and higher education [Bode Reference Bode2017], in France and elsewhere, makes the mechanisms of this study critical in understanding educational advantage in the 21st century. Learning to give does not only inculcate a sense of appropriate privilege in young philanthropists; it also helps them to get into college. But, even before that, such a program has implications for access to middle school. As one of the teachers estimated, half of the children at Leclerc applied to private schools after 5th grade. Mentions of philanthropic involvement in cover letters may increase their chances of being admitted to such schools and may also be of interest to confessional schools. We need to know more about what the effects of PE are, by articulating primary school to middle and high school admissions, and by re-embedding this education in familial reproduction strategies [Van Zanten Reference Van Zanten2003]. We also need a clearer picture of what the admission to middle schools and high schools looks like and what role such programs can play in it.
This article finally raises new interrogations on the making of political attitudes in public schools. In a range of possible repertoires of “solidarity” available to teachers, I have shown that philanthropy involves many boundaries with social “others.” This work has shown that the curriculum matters, but that children’s imaginaries are also the byproduct of their teachers’ beliefs about social justice and of their peers’ expectations. The repertoires I have described are deeply dependent upon the culture of public schools (especially the curriculum’s “blindness” to race and religion), and the historical development of MCE (from éducation populaire to philanthropy). Such repertoires are, finally, tied to pedagogical evolutions in public schools, where teacher-student interactions have become less hierarchical. Therefore, this nascent philanthropic repertoire is not necessarily applicable to other contexts, and we need to know more about how it unfolds in other contexts where citizenship education has a different history and may emphasize more issues such as racism [Wilkins Reference Wilkins2001], gender inequality [Arnot Reference Arnot2009] or social inequality [White, Mistry and Chow Reference White, Mistry and Chow2013]. On the gendered side especially, the results may be interpreted as a sign that boys bend toward a greater acceptance of social inequality [Pratto, Stallworth and Sidanius Reference Pratto, Stallworth and Sidanius1997]; but they open discussion on the greater political interest [Bos et al. Reference Bos, Holman, Greenlee, Oxley and Lay2020] they express. It appears that philanthropic education gives space for girls to express their interest in social matters without having to deal with politics directly and therefore offers an interesting avenue for the evolution of gendered outcomes in MCE.
Simultaneously, while philanthropic education seems to lead MCE in a more “liberal” direction, public education can also be used for nationalistic purposes [Molnár Reference Molnár2023]. We therefore need comparative ethnographies in this domain to understand how this affects children’s political and philanthropic repertoires. This is especially true to the relation to “others” and its gendered discrepancy that I have analyzed here. To assess it, we need more longitudinal studies and repeated interviews with children as they continue their educational journeys. Privilege management has strong potential effects, but socialization is a lifelong process, and such dispositions can evolve. Once we know better how privileged habitus are formed, we can focus on how they change.
Competing interests
The author discloses no competing interests.
Acknowledgments
The author is thankful to Sabine Rozier and Paul Lagneau-Ymonet, as well as Ariane Desroches-Touchain and Jonathan Marty for their initial comments on this work. The two anonymous reviewers provided incredibly insightful commentaries, and the author is particularly thankful to one EJS board member for their additional comments in preparing this version. Previous versions of the paper were presented at the Congrès de l’Association Française de Sociologie (Toulouse, France) and at the Ethnography and Qualitative Research International Conference (Trento, Italy) in July 2025, with very helpful comments from Caroline Bertron and Sebastiano Citroni.
