The story begins on a super-fast Chinese train, speeding northeast from Beijing under the Yanshan Mountain Range, the rocky green foothills of empire giving way to the craggy orange steppe of the great mounted warriors. I’d just moved from Fujian Province to Beijing, switching my teaching job from a private education venture started by a construction billionaire to a top public school in the capital. I arrived in China in January 2023, a few days after quarantine restrictions on new entrants were lifted. I came with a vague idea about wanting to explore Chinese education and better understand their system of college admissions as a historical extension of the Imperial Civil Service Entrance Exams, or keju (科举), initiated during the Sui Dynasty more than 1500 years ago.

I was interested in the connection between capitalism, schooling, and subject formation, in the vein of Willis and Bourdieu, and wanted to use entrance exams to look at these themes. My experience of high school in an affluent, immigrant-dominated suburb of Southern California, university in London, and graduate school at Yale were dominated by strikingly similar themes of aspirations towards class mobility, international regimes of prestige, and heavy, heavy cash flows designed to turn children into the high possible numbers and fanciest embossed degrees possible. I thought that working in China would lend some insight into the connection between college admissions and political economy. What would Socialism with Chinese Characteristics have to say about the Western tradition of schooling as a reifying initiation ceremony that introduces teenage minds into the realm and language of the Market?

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A sociology of elites has now been conducted at both an American private school and a handful of elite schools in Beijing. Although both are correct in identifying these high school students as a kind of international vanguard of new hierarchies, learning how to instrumentalize novel markers in an increasingly competitive world, they miss completely the critical perspective offered by Lukacs into how structural economic relations allow consciousness itself to become marketized, even in the realm of schooling. Anybody can tell you that private schools produce intensified teenage behaviors oriented around status, belonging, parental investments, and prestige. An overattachment to this behavioral point distracts from the sociological one that elite high school education showcases how competition, hierarchy, and reification have increasingly come to dominate systems of secondary education around the globe.

Progressive forces calling for resistance against the commodification of education and its avatars of business school and for-profit universities find themselves up against an enormous wall of pragmatism within the minds of the students they are trying to save. The ideals of the American liberal arts college model are fading, and in many cases they are instead subjecting their students to the ills of hyper-relativism, identity politics as worldview, and activism and individualism as ethics. There are fewer and fewer practical or ideological alternatives to existing systems of secondary and tertiary systems of education, even as headline after headline roll in of their ongoing implosion, from admissions scandals to professorial plagiarism at the highest ranks.

The cost of collapsing education systems is born out by the subjectivities of those forced to deal with these issues from the inside. Pragmatism and hyper-instrumentality are the only answers for students staring down the barrel of education systems, both in America and China, that are failing to deliver on any promise of holistic cultivation or vocational training.

I arrived in Beijing with this on my mind.

It seemed unlikely that there would be a huge difference between the attitudes of my Southern California high school peers and students at international schools in Beijing, but at least there might be something to say about the differing historical and sociological reasons for the convergence of two falsely meritocratic schemes. So I set off on a journey that I thought had emancipatory implications – the mechanisms of reification would be brought under control once and for all through the power of the sociological imagination.