I went to a mixed sex grammar school in the early 60s. I can honestly say that it was not a problem. The Headmaster would have expelled anyone causing a problem. The problem has got worse because offenders get away with it.
Likewise. Middle class privilege and landlines only.
I have never been middle class. I was a working class lad who had passed the 11 plus
definition
a society governed by people selected according to merit.
plural noun: meritocracies "Britain is a meritocracy, and everyone with skill and imagination may aspire to reach the highest level"
Not any bloody more; educational meritocracy used to give “working class” and lower middle class kids ( such as Thatcher) a leg up the
You got your grammar school education and you are now soundly middle class. I bet your middle class headmaster would have regarded smutty sexist talk as the province of the proles
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
Not any bloody more; educational meritocracy used to give “working class” and lower middle class kids ( such as Thatcher) a leg up the
You got your grammar school education and you are now soundly middle class. I bet your middle class headmaster would have regarded smutty sexist talk as the province of the proles
Not what happened to me. A grammar school education didn’t separate me from my working class socialist roots or my memories of family poverty. There’s no magical transformation of values, nor a magical forgetting of early experiences, simply because of a grammar school education. A good education is the antithesis of that kind of indoctrination. My school did not teach me I was better than anybody else just because I was bright enough to pass an exam.
And at home, my dad taught me a funny song as an antidote, sung to the tune of the Red Flag.
“The working class
Can kiss my ass
I’ve got the foreman’s job at last”.
None of us forgets our earlier experiences. The idea that I would for example look down in any way on the community I came from is just ludicrous. I would see that as a form of betrayal as well as a denial of all the good stuff I got out of my upbringing.
You may not have lost touch with your roots but you have no doubt benefited from your schooling which allowed you opportunities which might have been otherwise denied you
Upward social mobility does not mean a rejection of one’s origins
Anyway “working class roots” among the educated/ upwardly mobile does provide social cachet
After all, privilege looks better if perceived as being earned rather than inherited
Not any bloody more; educational meritocracy used to give “working class” and lower middle class kids ( such as Thatcher) a leg up the
You got your grammar school education and you are now soundly middle class. I bet your middle class headmaster would have regarded smutty sexist talk as the province of the proles
I am not ashamed to say that I was working class and I am still working class.
And within the working class you have subdivisions - Alan Bennett very good on this eg as between 'decent' and 'common'. My working class family never swore or used 'bad words', only 'rough' children did that.
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
You got your grammar school education and you are now soundly middle class. I bet your middle class headmaster would have regarded smutty sexist talk as the province of the proles
That's the remark I take issue with. It assumes membership of a social category produces dismissive and snobbish attitudes to membership of another social category. There may indeed be some connection but you can't safely apply a generalisation to any particular individual. That's classism.
As a matter of fact, my old head teacher was upwardly mobile from working class roots and never guilty of that kind of snobbishness. I'm not saying he was typical, nor that snobbery wasn't present to some extent in the school governors or other teachers. But it certainly wasn't any part of his leadership tone or his approach to what was fair.
You got your grammar school education and you are now soundly middle class. I bet your middle class headmaster would have regarded smutty sexist talk as the province of the proles
That's the remark I take issue with. It assumes membership of a social category produces dismissive and snobbish attitudes to membership of another social category. There may indeed be some connection but you can't safely apply a generalisation to any particular individual. That's classism.
As a matter of fact, my old head teacher was upwardly mobile from working class roots and never guilty of that kind of snobbishness. I'm not saying he was typical, nor that snobbery wasn't present to some extent in the school governors or other teachers. But it certainly wasn't any part of his leadership tone or his approach to what was fair.
Maybe I was fortunate?
/class tangent
Yes you were indeed; lone of a fortunate generation
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
I doubt whether I'm alone. My generation benefited from Beveridge educational reforms, the Welfare State, full employment, final salary pension schemes. That I think was a different kind of privilege. I'm grateful. That doesn't make me (or anyone else) ignorant of, or indifferent to, present sufferings and the need for reforms
I went to a mixed sex grammar school in the early 60s. I can honestly say that it was not a problem. The Headmaster would have expelled anyone causing a problem. The problem has got worse because offenders get away with it.
Likewise. Middle class privilege and landlines only.
I have never been middle class. I was a working class lad who had passed the 11 plus
Me too. In to a middle class institution. Lived in a post-war terraced pebble dash council house.
I doubt whether I'm alone. My generation benefited from Beveridge educational reforms, the Welfare State, full employment, final salary pension schemes. That I think was a different kind of privilege. I'm grateful. That doesn't make me (or anyone else) ignorant of, or indifferent to, present sufferings and the need for reforms
Reread my post re your antecedents. You have moved on but was it ever suggested that you had turned your back.
I went to a mixed sex grammar school in the early 60s. I can honestly say that it was not a problem. The Headmaster would have expelled anyone causing a problem. The problem has got worse because offenders get away with it.
Likewise. Middle class privilege and landlines only.
I have never been middle class. I was a working class lad who had passed the 11 plus
Me too. In to a middle class institution. Lived in a post-war terraced pebble dash council house.
I went to a mixed sex grammar school in the early 60s. I can honestly say that it was not a problem. The Headmaster would have expelled anyone causing a problem. The problem has got worse because offenders get away with it.
Likewise. Middle class privilege and landlines only.
I have never been middle class. I was a working class lad who had passed the 11 plus
Me too. In to a middle class institution. Lived in a post-war terraced pebble dash council house.
You got your grammar school education and you are now soundly middle class. I bet your middle class headmaster would have regarded smutty sexist talk as the province of the proles
That's the remark I take issue with. It assumes membership of a social category produces dismissive and snobbish attitudes to membership of another social category. There may indeed be some connection but you can't safely apply a generalisation to any particular individual. That's classism.
As a matter of fact, my old head teacher was upwardly mobile from working class roots and never guilty of that kind of snobbishness. I'm not saying he was typical, nor that snobbery wasn't present to some extent in the school governors or other teachers. But it certainly wasn't any part of his leadership tone or his approach to what was fair.
Maybe I was fortunate?
/class tangent
My Head was similar. The son of a miner he got a scholarship to Cambridge and was keen to support pupils who came from similar roots. I know I benefitted from it.
One thing he always did which i still remember. He ate with us in the canteen and queued for his dinner with the rest. When we had to fetch the veg containers he did that in rotation as well as taking the washing up away. He had the trust and respect of the school.
Applying it to my own life, I grew up in a C2 household (my dad was a carpenter) at a time when skilled manual workers were not as well paid in the UK as they are today. My own working experience meant that I moved to C1 then to B. Now that I'm retired, I appear to be E. I assess that my retirement income (state plus ocupational) probably puts me in D or maybe the bottom of C2. My wife grew up in a B household, in terms of working income she moved to C1 and in terms of retirement income is definitely E.
In terms of where we lived, I grew up on a council estate, lived in rented accommodation in my early to mid twenties and in the first couple of years after we married, then bought a pretty modest home over the next quarter of a century. Currently we live in a terrace in a house we own though the affordable houses either side are rented. We also own one six years old car.
So my social and economic experiences have been variable but I don't think they have had much of an impact on my values. I think my upbringing and Christian faith have had a much more profound influence on my values then my varied social experiences in different social classes. I guess I'm by no means alone in that.
Class division varies considerably from country to country. The NRS social grading, or equivalent versions, might perhaps fit better with a country where hierarchy is more important?
Class can be determined purely economically - "if your income is in bracket A, then you're in class X". But in terms of how it influences your values, then self identification with a specific class becomes important - and that can be done in a variety of different ways. A society that prefers to hide economical differences will likely try to reduce the number of classes in such a way as to suggest sameness.
I think therefore that a discussion on how class influences values, have to be placed in a specific cultural context, where the level of class conflict, conspicious consumption, wealth disparity between rich and poor, etc. all are important.
My personal experience from a country with a very strong social democratic tradition, is that the middle class and the working class often are associated with very positive values - leading to weird results when people who are clearly top 10% income refer to themselves as "working class".
Maybe there's something important in which class has the strongest social / cultural "pull" effect? If the "pull" effect primarily is from the upper class (i.e., most people want to be on top), then that leads to a greater hierarchy, as people try to indicate that they are on a higher level than those below them. If on the other hand the middle class has a stronger "pull", then people try to hide away economical differences?
I had a C2 (machine tool operator) upbringing. My parents grew up C2 (baker) and D (labourer). No-one has mentioned yet this phenomenon - I'm pretty sure all my grandparents voted Tory, as has my Dad predominantly. Aspirational-working-class was quite big in the saarrrf-east, and even here in the NW I know quite a few. Even after Thatcher.
My values came from the church (Methodist) and possibly my Mum's too (rural Anglican). But C2s in general had a pretty strict code themselves that was tangled up with being aspirational, where elbows-off-the-table, buTTer not bu-er and some pretty strict views about what was 'smut' could happily exist outside a religious context. There was some 'people like us' (we do this, and we don't do that) stuff in that mix, too, and some quite strict stuff about solidarity, and not-showing-off.
A former shippie from a working class background once described his experience.
He was granted a full scholarship to an exclusive school. He did well academically, but the teachers and other students gave him a very hard time.
When the time came to apply to a university, he was rejected by Oxbridge, but accepted by another university. A teacher told him, with great satisfaction, that people like him did no belong at the ancient universities.
He married a woman from a middle-class background, and his mother never forgave him. She insisted that he should have stuck to his own social class.
Returning to the thread title, my perception (based on the wholly un-statistically valid sample of my grandparents - one lot working class, one lot middle class) is that the old fashioned working class may tend to be more small c conservative and the middle class more small l liberal. As for example, one set of grandparents was much more open to the idea of sex before marriage than the other.
A relative of mine who was a Labour MP and who lived in an upmarket part of Glasgow with a daughter at a fee-paying school told me that 'if you work, then you are working class'
My Dad was a skilled carpenter, my Mum worked in a jam factory while my granny looked after us children. We lived in a mill town in a terraced house, both my grandfathers were mill workers.
My Dad trained for the Ministry aged 30, my Mum and grandma kept the family going while Dad was training for four years in London as he only got ten shillings a week. Then, when he became a minister we suddenly became ‘middle class’. My Dad always said ‘middle class on a working class salary!’ They both voted Liberal all their lives.
A relative of mine who was a Labour MP and who lived in an upmarket part of Glasgow with a daughter at a fee-paying school told me that 'if you work, then you are working class'
That went out the window with buttoned boots!
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
FriendlyFire is right. Class is still an issue in the UK though I think it has waned during my lifetime. I think it works differently in other countries and cultures.
The original underlying premises of superior breeding preceded eugenics ideas but may have been reinforced by them. They are of course nonsense given normal genetic variation and they are ethical nonsense as a means of judging the worth of any human being. MLK’s content of character comment pierced the nonsense so far as race is concerned and works just as well with classism.
I think the real issue is the extent to which cultures uphold and reinforce these wrong ideas. To that extent, class identification may reinforce prejudices (witness Moo’s story) but it is not inevitable that it does.
My experience is similar to others who have already posted. I came from a working class family (my dad ran a pub and then worked on the buses). I passed the 11 plus and went to grammar school and (eventually) to university. My work history would place me as middle class (IT development and then Anglican priest). But I've always been aware of the gulf that exists between those like me and those who have grown up in a middle-class environment and who take privilege for granted. I've lost count of the number of times that I've been subtly excluded because I didn't go to the "right" school or university or because I didn't know the "right" people.
I know some people do try and leave their roots behind as they climb the social ladder but there are many of us who don't - who remember what it was like to be in a family that struggled to make ends meet; where foreign holidays were unthinkable; where the family car wasn't a flashy new thing but an old ropey jalopy kept going for as long as possible.
I don't think social class has anything to do with occupation at all, although there are correlations. I've met a very upper-class plumber - his brothers had followed their public school education with Oxbridge and the kind of city non-job that people with the right accent get, whereas he, with the same accent and upbringing, preferred to work with his hands. He certainly had a working-class job, but he was by no means working class. His accent, his attitudes - even his dress - were driven by his upbringing rather than his occupation. (I rather suspect that he was subsidized by family money as well.)
My experience is similar to others who have already posted. I came from a working class family (my dad ran a pub and then worked on the buses). I passed the 11 plus and went to grammar school and (eventually) to university. My work history would place me as middle class (IT development and then Anglican priest). But I've always been aware of the gulf that exists between those like me and those who have grown up in a middle-class environment and who take privilege for granted. I've lost count of the number of times that I've been subtly excluded because I didn't go to the "right" school or university or because I didn't know the "right" people.
I know some people do try and leave their roots behind as they climb the social ladder but there are many of us who don't - who remember what it was like to be in a family that struggled to make ends meet; where foreign holidays were unthinkable; where the family car wasn't a flashy new thing but an old ropey jalopy kept going for as long as possible.
I don't think social class has anything to do with occupation at all, although there are correlations. I've met a very upper-class plumber - his brothers had followed their public school education with Oxbridge and the kind of city non-job that people with the right accent get, whereas he, with the same accent and upbringing, preferred to work with his hands. He certainly had a working-class job, but he was by no means working class. His accent, his attitudes - even his dress - were driven by his upbringing rather than his occupation. (I rather suspect that he was subsidized by family money as well.)
I was brought up by parents of working class background, but moved into middle. (Accountant and teacher.) We had books. So did farming/gardening Liberal grandfather. Widow of train guard grandmother didn't.
I was astonished when my parents got involved with Rotary/Inner Wheel to find how many middle class homes did not have books. I had assumed books were a marker of middle class. (I now find that bookshelves are supposed to make houses difficult to sell.)
My experience is similar to others who have already posted. I came from a working class family (my dad ran a pub and then worked on the buses). I passed the 11 plus and went to grammar school and (eventually) to university. My work history would place me as middle class (IT development and then Anglican priest). But I've always been aware of the gulf that exists between those like me and those who have grown up in a middle-class environment and who take privilege for granted. I've lost count of the number of times that I've been subtly excluded because I didn't go to the "right" school or university or because I didn't know the "right" people.
I know some people do try and leave their roots behind as they climb the social ladder but there are many of us who don't - who remember what it was like to be in a family that struggled to make ends meet; where foreign holidays were unthinkable; where the family car wasn't a flashy new thing but an old ropey jalopy kept going for as long as possible.
Council House(condemned) with water running down the walls. No holidays. No car. 2nd hand pushbikes. Clothes from jumble sales. Written off and bullied at school at age 11 by the Head who was a URC elder. Bottom of the rural pile in most eyes - my dad a Farm labourer who left school at 14. Not Christened in my local c of e because the Vicar refused to do it.
Started work as a Labourer myself eating bread in the sweat of my brow.
6 A levels, 2 Cambridge Degrees and several other degree level qualifications later in 3 separate and distinct disciplines. Project managing in a national product launch used by 4 million plus people today. Ultimately ran a budget of several hundred million. I've never lived in a posh area, sent my children to state schools, drive rusty cars where the petrol is the most valuable thing in them and earn minimum wage.
My experience is similar to others who have already posted. I came from a working class family (my dad ran a pub and then worked on the buses). I passed the 11 plus and went to grammar school and (eventually) to university. My work history would place me as middle class (IT development and then Anglican priest). But I've always been aware of the gulf that exists between those like me and those who have grown up in a middle-class environment and who take privilege for granted. I've lost count of the number of times that I've been subtly excluded because I didn't go to the "right" school or university or because I didn't know the "right" people.
I know some people do try and leave their roots behind as they climb the social ladder but there are many of us who don't - who remember what it was like to be in a family that struggled to make ends meet; where foreign holidays were unthinkable; where the family car wasn't a flashy new thing but an old ropey jalopy kept going for as long as possible.
Well, but does it? Suppose he'd had a big argument with his family about his desire to do something practical rather than float around in the city. Or suppose his family had lost their last cufflink at Lloyd's, and that as a consequence of either of these, he lived in a rented bedsit? Would that make a difference to his social class? I don't think so.
My wife and both came from working class backgrounds. Neither of our fathers graduated from high school. Her father worked up to retiring as a train engineer and mine spent most of his career as a security guard. We both have multiple degrees and work in professions that are considered middle class. I think most of your core values come from your family of origin. That said I moved progessively to the left over my university career.
Regarding attitudes and behaviour a crucial factor appears to be status differences within classes as much as between them, assuming they can be defined. The difference between respectable and non-respectable working class is a very important social distinction for the former, having a marked impact on political attitudes towards welfare and political choice, just as racism is important to the armour propre of the white working class, particularly in the American South. These sorts of issues were discussed by Runciman, who recently passed away, in his seminal work, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century England." His argument was that the social psychology of relative deprivation explains why social attitudes have failed to correspond with the actual facts of economic, social and political inequality. It may well be that we have become less aware of class in recent years, but that does not mean its structural impact has ceased, as the battle Marcus Rashford is fighting to preserve a twenty quid help to the poorest families in British society against the corrupt distribution of covid telephone number contracts demonstrates, not to mention the socially unequal impact of the disease. The problem he identified, IMO, is no less real now that it was then, it's just that it's covered with a Union Jack and Saltire Flag, and a Shamrock and Orange Sash across the water.
<snip> - who remember what it was like to be in a family that struggled to make ends meet; where foreign holidays were unthinkable; where the family car wasn't a flashy new thing but an old ropey jalopy kept going for as long as possible.
I think household disposable income is sometimes a poor proxy for social class. I passed 11+, but just at the point where the local authority went fully comprehensive with schools strictly by catchment, some formerly direct grant schools pulled out of the scheme as a result. The formerly secondary modern school to which I would have gone had a bad reputation, and not just academically. I ended up going to a former direct grant grammar with, at the time, affordable fees. Similar things happened with my siblings. Education was a major drain in the family budget.
Our first family car lasted about seven years, and its replacement, two or three years old at purchase lasted another nine years.
Holidays were quite often with family in Scotland and/or camping in our trailer tent. After we entered the EU, and when my mother was working full time, we had two holidays in France, one on a boat on a canal (a French counterpart of a couple of holidays in the Norfolk broads), and one camping. The only additional cost was the ferry crossing.
Disposable income was very tight, and the struggle to make ends meet and the old ropy jalopy is a familiar story. But by any other measure we were very much middle class, though not exactly bourgeoisie.
I try and live without labeling myself - I found in the past that it was far too restrictive, But that doesn't mean that I am not aware of ways in which perceived status/class have been used to discriminate or exclude. I'm not resentful - just aware of it.
My class profile is somewhat complicated, which stands me in good stead in social services as I have to assess people from a very wide range of backgrounds (including the upper middle class occasionally).
I'm the youngest of 8 children from a rough council estate in Luton, my father worked in a dairy factory and my mother was a canteen cook so band D on NRS ). My siblings left school at 15/16 to work in factories, shops, or have a baby. I left school to go on a youth training scheme in a care home. I wanted to go to college and dreamed of being a teacher but no-one from my estate went to university and my parents thought I should get a job and pay rent.
It was the owners of the care home (in the posher nearby town) who encouraged me to apply to nurse training, the old fashioned type that only needed 5 o'levels. One of my nurse tutors was very research orientated and she inspired me to do a research course with Open University. I now have 2 degrees, a Masters and am currently doing a professional doctorate in education. I became a nurse practitioner, lectured in nursing and now lecture in health and social care with the OU and live in Cambridge. I've moved from a D to a B. My husband always was a B (son of theologians, Oxford degree, Imperial PhD, owns a small tech company). Our backgrounds are worlds apart and it can be very obvious at times. My children are very much middle class and expect to go to university.
I now straddle two worlds; the posh middle class liberal remain-y Cambridge of my day to day life and the solidly working class Luton leavers that make up my family (who call me posh). I still live on a council estate, though we bought our house, and I know I vary my accent according to who I'm speaking to. Being a nurse helps in moving in a variety of circles; I've looked after prostitutes and princesses (nursing prostitutes is very rewarding but also heartbreaking). Many of my work colleagues have working class backgrounds, especially the ex-nurses, and most of my students are working class care workers on minimum wage, wanting to change their lives. I care deeply for my students and want to be a role model to them.
I often use my story when teaching students about social and cultural capital, because it was the people who came into my life with different ideas that changed its trajectory. My family had a strong work ethic but saw little value in education beyond the basics (my father could barely read). My mother was proud when I qualified as a nurse but had no interest in my degree as it was from a world she did not understand. Working in the care home introduced me to middle class women whose daughters (the same age as me) thought that going to college and uni was normal. They'll never know how much I owe them.
(I'm sure my mum voted Tory in the 80s, as mentioned above. Luton North had a Tory MP)
When I went to university, people were saying that if you go to university, you immediately become middle class. And I can see some truth in that, in terms of opportunities and privilege. I felt immensely privileged to go to university, with a bit of imposter syndrome too, as I was the first in my family to even get A levels, and the university I went to was rather a posh one, where I became very aware of social class in a way I never had before.
Something I do notice, though, when I get in touch with old friends from school or uni is that the people who already had a reasonably well-off, comfortable, middle class family are more likely to have that kind of life for themselves now, whereas people from poorer backgrounds are more likely (though not always) to be poorer. Because opportunities and privilege are of course more than simply going to university - family contacts and financial support can help a person succeed, and of course various other things play a part in how easy/difficult it is to climb the social ladder, like gender, skin colour, disability, etc. It is of course very complex. And people often don't like being called middle class, in the same way that people don't like being called wealthy, and of course everything is relative.
For myself, I don't feel middle class in many ways. My income is very low, and when I'm with people who are on considerably higher incomes, I am aware that though they may also be from a lower class background, their money has given them opportunities that are more consistent with a middle class lifestyle - things like going out to eat at nice restaurants, going to the theatre regularly, travelling abroad, doing a whole variety of things that cost money, meeting a wide variety of people. On the other hand, when I've worked in working class type jobs, I've also been aware that my education makes me not truly working class, because I do have an advantage and privilege over colleagues who grew up in environments where they simply weren't expected to do well in school or go to university, and so that was not something they even considered and it affects how they view themselves and the expectations they have of themselves. Of course, there are working class families who do encourage their kids to do well and go to university, but equally, in areas of poverty and deprivation, there can be all sorts of other pressures that make people lose morale, and not see themselves as the kinds of people who can get what they want, do what they want, etc.
To me, this is a big class difference I observe - more higher class people are treated with more respect, they don't have the basic survival worries, and so are more likely to expect life to give them what they want, to approach it with more boldness, to have high expectations, whereas more lower class people are often treated as less important, their basic needs not even always seen as important, and it can wear them down, and their expectations are lower. And that can really have an impact in what people get out of life.
Perhaps as an analogy, you know the viral story of the guy who had a customer being really difficult with him lver email, and he realised after a while it's because the customer thought he was a woman, and the moment he said he was a man taking over the case, the customer treated him with much more respect. And so he came to realise how much harder a job can be for a woman because of how they are treated, assumptions from customers that they are less capable, less worthy of respect, etc. I think the same can apply to class, and so if you are someone who learns to present yourself in a more middle class way, even in terms of sounding educated, using correct grammar, you are treated with more respect and life becomes easier.
I think a discussion around class that doesn't consider material conditions is somewhat futile, but this appears to be the form in the UK, so here we go again.
Comments
definition
a society governed by people selected according to merit.
plural noun: meritocracies
"Britain is a meritocracy, and everyone with skill and imagination may aspire to reach the highest level"
You got your grammar school education and you are now soundly middle class. I bet your middle class headmaster would have regarded smutty sexist talk as the province of the proles
Not what happened to me. A grammar school education didn’t separate me from my working class socialist roots or my memories of family poverty. There’s no magical transformation of values, nor a magical forgetting of early experiences, simply because of a grammar school education. A good education is the antithesis of that kind of indoctrination. My school did not teach me I was better than anybody else just because I was bright enough to pass an exam.
And at home, my dad taught me a funny song as an antidote, sung to the tune of the Red Flag.
“The working class
Can kiss my ass
I’ve got the foreman’s job at last”.
None of us forgets our earlier experiences. The idea that I would for example look down in any way on the community I came from is just ludicrous. I would see that as a form of betrayal as well as a denial of all the good stuff I got out of my upbringing.
Upward social mobility does not mean a rejection of one’s origins
Anyway “working class roots” among the educated/ upwardly mobile does provide social cachet
After all, privilege looks better if perceived as being earned rather than inherited
I am not ashamed to say that I was working class and I am still working class.
Once working class always working class does not necessarily apply
If you indeed are what you say, you are indeed a rare beast on this resolutely bourgeois vessel!
That's the remark I take issue with. It assumes membership of a social category produces dismissive and snobbish attitudes to membership of another social category. There may indeed be some connection but you can't safely apply a generalisation to any particular individual. That's classism.
As a matter of fact, my old head teacher was upwardly mobile from working class roots and never guilty of that kind of snobbishness. I'm not saying he was typical, nor that snobbery wasn't present to some extent in the school governors or other teachers. But it certainly wasn't any part of his leadership tone or his approach to what was fair.
Maybe I was fortunate?
/class tangent
Yes you were indeed; lone of a fortunate generation
Me too. In to a middle class institution. Lived in a post-war terraced pebble dash council house.
Reread my post re your antecedents. You have moved on but was it ever suggested that you had turned your back.
I think not.
Well, who’s a clever boy, then?
Not deep enough by far. Wee wee end of the pool.
My Head was similar. The son of a miner he got a scholarship to Cambridge and was keen to support pupils who came from similar roots. I know I benefitted from it.
One thing he always did which i still remember. He ate with us in the canteen and queued for his dinner with the rest. When we had to fetch the veg containers he did that in rotation as well as taking the washing up away. He had the trust and respect of the school.
If he’d had lunch in the staff office would it have made him a class traitor?
Here is the NRS social grading.
Applying it to my own life, I grew up in a C2 household (my dad was a carpenter) at a time when skilled manual workers were not as well paid in the UK as they are today. My own working experience meant that I moved to C1 then to B. Now that I'm retired, I appear to be E. I assess that my retirement income (state plus ocupational) probably puts me in D or maybe the bottom of C2. My wife grew up in a B household, in terms of working income she moved to C1 and in terms of retirement income is definitely E.
In terms of where we lived, I grew up on a council estate, lived in rented accommodation in my early to mid twenties and in the first couple of years after we married, then bought a pretty modest home over the next quarter of a century. Currently we live in a terrace in a house we own though the affordable houses either side are rented. We also own one six years old car.
So my social and economic experiences have been variable but I don't think they have had much of an impact on my values. I think my upbringing and Christian faith have had a much more profound influence on my values then my varied social experiences in different social classes. I guess I'm by no means alone in that.
The one thing I'm sure I'm not is a member of the bourgeoisie.
Class can be determined purely economically - "if your income is in bracket A, then you're in class X". But in terms of how it influences your values, then self identification with a specific class becomes important - and that can be done in a variety of different ways. A society that prefers to hide economical differences will likely try to reduce the number of classes in such a way as to suggest sameness.
I think therefore that a discussion on how class influences values, have to be placed in a specific cultural context, where the level of class conflict, conspicious consumption, wealth disparity between rich and poor, etc. all are important.
My personal experience from a country with a very strong social democratic tradition, is that the middle class and the working class often are associated with very positive values - leading to weird results when people who are clearly top 10% income refer to themselves as "working class".
Maybe there's something important in which class has the strongest social / cultural "pull" effect? If the "pull" effect primarily is from the upper class (i.e., most people want to be on top), then that leads to a greater hierarchy, as people try to indicate that they are on a higher level than those below them. If on the other hand the middle class has a stronger "pull", then people try to hide away economical differences?
My values came from the church (Methodist) and possibly my Mum's too (rural Anglican). But C2s in general had a pretty strict code themselves that was tangled up with being aspirational, where elbows-off-the-table, buTTer not bu-er and some pretty strict views about what was 'smut' could happily exist outside a religious context. There was some 'people like us' (we do this, and we don't do that) stuff in that mix, too, and some quite strict stuff about solidarity, and not-showing-off.
He was granted a full scholarship to an exclusive school. He did well academically, but the teachers and other students gave him a very hard time.
When the time came to apply to a university, he was rejected by Oxbridge, but accepted by another university. A teacher told him, with great satisfaction, that people like him did no belong at the ancient universities.
He married a woman from a middle-class background, and his mother never forgave him. She insisted that he should have stuck to his own social class.
The poorer/less educated the girl, the more likely she’d end up on the street
My Dad trained for the Ministry aged 30, my Mum and grandma kept the family going while Dad was training for four years in London as he only got ten shillings a week. Then, when he became a minister we suddenly became ‘middle class’. My Dad always said ‘middle class on a working class salary!’ They both voted Liberal all their lives.
That went out the window with buttoned boots!
The original underlying premises of superior breeding preceded eugenics ideas but may have been reinforced by them. They are of course nonsense given normal genetic variation and they are ethical nonsense as a means of judging the worth of any human being. MLK’s content of character comment pierced the nonsense so far as race is concerned and works just as well with classism.
I think the real issue is the extent to which cultures uphold and reinforce these wrong ideas. To that extent, class identification may reinforce prejudices (witness Moo’s story) but it is not inevitable that it does.
I know some people do try and leave their roots behind as they climb the social ladder but there are many of us who don't - who remember what it was like to be in a family that struggled to make ends meet; where foreign holidays were unthinkable; where the family car wasn't a flashy new thing but an old ropey jalopy kept going for as long as possible.
And the resentment dies hard
Your last comment says it all
I was astonished when my parents got involved with Rotary/Inner Wheel to find how many middle class homes did not have books. I had assumed books were a marker of middle class. (I now find that bookshelves are supposed to make houses difficult to sell.)
Council House(condemned) with water running down the walls. No holidays. No car. 2nd hand pushbikes. Clothes from jumble sales. Written off and bullied at school at age 11 by the Head who was a URC elder. Bottom of the rural pile in most eyes - my dad a Farm labourer who left school at 14. Not Christened in my local c of e because the Vicar refused to do it.
Started work as a Labourer myself eating bread in the sweat of my brow.
6 A levels, 2 Cambridge Degrees and several other degree level qualifications later in 3 separate and distinct disciplines. Project managing in a national product launch used by 4 million plus people today. Ultimately ran a budget of several hundred million. I've never lived in a posh area, sent my children to state schools, drive rusty cars where the petrol is the most valuable thing in them and earn minimum wage.
What was I and what am I now?
Which just goes to show how little you know.
Well, but does it? Suppose he'd had a big argument with his family about his desire to do something practical rather than float around in the city. Or suppose his family had lost their last cufflink at Lloyd's, and that as a consequence of either of these, he lived in a rented bedsit? Would that make a difference to his social class? I don't think so.
So in your view of the world, "toff" vs "prole" is determined by bank balance?
Regarding attitudes and behaviour a crucial factor appears to be status differences within classes as much as between them, assuming they can be defined. The difference between respectable and non-respectable working class is a very important social distinction for the former, having a marked impact on political attitudes towards welfare and political choice, just as racism is important to the armour propre of the white working class, particularly in the American South. These sorts of issues were discussed by Runciman, who recently passed away, in his seminal work, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century England." His argument was that the social psychology of relative deprivation explains why social attitudes have failed to correspond with the actual facts of economic, social and political inequality. It may well be that we have become less aware of class in recent years, but that does not mean its structural impact has ceased, as the battle Marcus Rashford is fighting to preserve a twenty quid help to the poorest families in British society against the corrupt distribution of covid telephone number contracts demonstrates, not to mention the socially unequal impact of the disease. The problem he identified, IMO, is no less real now that it was then, it's just that it's covered with a Union Jack and Saltire Flag, and a Shamrock and Orange Sash across the water.
I think household disposable income is sometimes a poor proxy for social class. I passed 11+, but just at the point where the local authority went fully comprehensive with schools strictly by catchment, some formerly direct grant schools pulled out of the scheme as a result. The formerly secondary modern school to which I would have gone had a bad reputation, and not just academically. I ended up going to a former direct grant grammar with, at the time, affordable fees. Similar things happened with my siblings. Education was a major drain in the family budget.
Our first family car lasted about seven years, and its replacement, two or three years old at purchase lasted another nine years.
Holidays were quite often with family in Scotland and/or camping in our trailer tent. After we entered the EU, and when my mother was working full time, we had two holidays in France, one on a boat on a canal (a French counterpart of a couple of holidays in the Norfolk broads), and one camping. The only additional cost was the ferry crossing.
Disposable income was very tight, and the struggle to make ends meet and the old ropy jalopy is a familiar story. But by any other measure we were very much middle class, though not exactly bourgeoisie.
My father was a foundry worker and so was his father. My other grandfather was a car worker at Austins. His father was a miner.
I try and live without labeling myself - I found in the past that it was far too restrictive, But that doesn't mean that I am not aware of ways in which perceived status/class have been used to discriminate or exclude. I'm not resentful - just aware of it.
It was the owners of the care home (in the posher nearby town) who encouraged me to apply to nurse training, the old fashioned type that only needed 5 o'levels. One of my nurse tutors was very research orientated and she inspired me to do a research course with Open University. I now have 2 degrees, a Masters and am currently doing a professional doctorate in education. I became a nurse practitioner, lectured in nursing and now lecture in health and social care with the OU and live in Cambridge. I've moved from a D to a B. My husband always was a B (son of theologians, Oxford degree, Imperial PhD, owns a small tech company). Our backgrounds are worlds apart and it can be very obvious at times. My children are very much middle class and expect to go to university.
I now straddle two worlds; the posh middle class liberal remain-y Cambridge of my day to day life and the solidly working class Luton leavers that make up my family (who call me posh). I still live on a council estate, though we bought our house, and I know I vary my accent according to who I'm speaking to. Being a nurse helps in moving in a variety of circles; I've looked after prostitutes and princesses (nursing prostitutes is very rewarding but also heartbreaking). Many of my work colleagues have working class backgrounds, especially the ex-nurses, and most of my students are working class care workers on minimum wage, wanting to change their lives. I care deeply for my students and want to be a role model to them.
I often use my story when teaching students about social and cultural capital, because it was the people who came into my life with different ideas that changed its trajectory. My family had a strong work ethic but saw little value in education beyond the basics (my father could barely read). My mother was proud when I qualified as a nurse but had no interest in my degree as it was from a world she did not understand. Working in the care home introduced me to middle class women whose daughters (the same age as me) thought that going to college and uni was normal. They'll never know how much I owe them.
(I'm sure my mum voted Tory in the 80s, as mentioned above. Luton North had a Tory MP)
Something I do notice, though, when I get in touch with old friends from school or uni is that the people who already had a reasonably well-off, comfortable, middle class family are more likely to have that kind of life for themselves now, whereas people from poorer backgrounds are more likely (though not always) to be poorer. Because opportunities and privilege are of course more than simply going to university - family contacts and financial support can help a person succeed, and of course various other things play a part in how easy/difficult it is to climb the social ladder, like gender, skin colour, disability, etc. It is of course very complex. And people often don't like being called middle class, in the same way that people don't like being called wealthy, and of course everything is relative.
For myself, I don't feel middle class in many ways. My income is very low, and when I'm with people who are on considerably higher incomes, I am aware that though they may also be from a lower class background, their money has given them opportunities that are more consistent with a middle class lifestyle - things like going out to eat at nice restaurants, going to the theatre regularly, travelling abroad, doing a whole variety of things that cost money, meeting a wide variety of people. On the other hand, when I've worked in working class type jobs, I've also been aware that my education makes me not truly working class, because I do have an advantage and privilege over colleagues who grew up in environments where they simply weren't expected to do well in school or go to university, and so that was not something they even considered and it affects how they view themselves and the expectations they have of themselves. Of course, there are working class families who do encourage their kids to do well and go to university, but equally, in areas of poverty and deprivation, there can be all sorts of other pressures that make people lose morale, and not see themselves as the kinds of people who can get what they want, do what they want, etc.
To me, this is a big class difference I observe - more higher class people are treated with more respect, they don't have the basic survival worries, and so are more likely to expect life to give them what they want, to approach it with more boldness, to have high expectations, whereas more lower class people are often treated as less important, their basic needs not even always seen as important, and it can wear them down, and their expectations are lower. And that can really have an impact in what people get out of life.
Perhaps as an analogy, you know the viral story of the guy who had a customer being really difficult with him lver email, and he realised after a while it's because the customer thought he was a woman, and the moment he said he was a man taking over the case, the customer treated him with much more respect. And so he came to realise how much harder a job can be for a woman because of how they are treated, assumptions from customers that they are less capable, less worthy of respect, etc. I think the same can apply to class, and so if you are someone who learns to present yourself in a more middle class way, even in terms of sounding educated, using correct grammar, you are treated with more respect and life becomes easier.