Achieving more than grades: morality, race, and enrichment education

Abstract

Affluent parents pursue after-school educational and other extracurricular options for their children in order to instill human capital and cultural capital. Such parents also worry about raising spoiled children with too much entitlement. With this in mind, we would expect parents whose children attend private, after-school learning centers—despite attending well-resourced schools—to appreciate the ability to accrue capital but to regret the moral implications for their children. I have interviewed white professionals who enroll their young children in weekly classes at private learning centers, a site of increasing educational inequality. In contrast to expectations, parents believe it is through such enrollment, not despite it, that they are able to raise children with proper values, separate from instilling cultural or human capital. Parents’ conceptions of moral parenting reveal underlying cultural binaries in regard to raising children, of being hard working versus overindulged and of humanistic versus robotic. Here, we see the reach of culture, for even practices clearly motivated by practical considerations have deeper meanings. We also see the reach of race. They mostly praise rather than criticize Asian Americans, and they reserve their harshest critiques for fellow white professionals, whom they frame in line with anti-black stereotypes.