And not just kids. Is it still just education?
When I was eleven, I passed the Eleven plus exam. I went from an elementary school to a grammar school, the path to University. My brother didn't pass. He went to the school for the kids who failed. The eleven plus was finally denounced for dividing up England's kids into bright and dim at eleven years old. So what happened?
As a student I did a lot of odd jobs. I remember innocently asking a young man why he was just working in the hotel kitchen too. (I was always too timid to be a waitress.) "Why?" he said, very sarcastic, "'Cos I'm ignorent, en' I?"
Home from Yugoslavia, I taught for a while at a secondary school and immigrant center.
The racial tension arose between Asian boys and the black and white D stream who resented the Pakistani and Indian kids talking about the idea of becoming a lawyer or doctor or maybe owning their own shop.
The old constraints on English behavior are long gone, the old stuff about knowing your place. (See any old English movie.) The English have always been better at the dignity and discipline of civic rather than family life. (Who make the best queues, then?) And there was always the typical Anglo Saxon sneering at education. You went to Eton and Oxford or Cambridge, like the Prime Minister, for the connections. Long before Sarah Palin, the joke used to be that only in England would "-Oh, he's very clever," be an insult.
So far nothing has happened in Scotland or Wales. Scots and Welsh families, however poor, have always put a premium on education. Hard to be proud to be English -English now is what's left over when you take away Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
And now everyone has a chance at education. Now if you're down at the bottom you no longer have the consolation that it's the unfair world.It must be "because I'm ignorent- en' I?"
And brooding most about education means I'm a bloomin' liberal, en I?
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