to be offended that, because I can string a sentence together and don't use txspk, people assume that I must be middle class?

[colditz]

There is nothing at all wrong with being middle class. It's a nice state of being.

But I get very upset when my friends, or posters her, say things like "Well, you are quite middle class, aren't you!"

I'm not. I'm quite intelligent, I'm quite well read, I'm quite moral and I'm getting on for quite old, but I'm not at ALL middle class.

It's as if to be working class (which I consider myself to be) you have to be ignorant and a bit dim, thoroughly uninterested in the world beyond the TV and actually, that's insulting. Some working class people are ignorant and a bit thick, but the same could be said for any class of people. Look at the Duke Of Edinborough!

I can be working class and quite bright, I can be working class and quite well read, I can be working class and able to vocally assert myself without cursing. Working class is not synonymous with "incapable of functioning properly outside of a greasy caff"

I would rather be thought of as middle class than thick

It wouldn't really worry me if someone said I was working class or middle class anyway.

But it should be one or the other!!!!!!! The world is not polarised into two groups opf people, the middle class people on one hand and the thick people on the other!!!!!!!!!

"Working or educating yourself up into a higher socio-economic group is apparently not a good thing any more."

That seems to demonstrate the precise misunderstanding around which this thread centres.

WORKING yourself up (though we might quibble about the word "up")is a legitimate aspiration. It implies, quite correctly, that in general middle class people earn more money than working class people.

EDUCATING yourself up implies that, by virtue of being working class, one is uneducated and that only the middle and upper classes can properly be called "educated". Which is offensive horse shit.

I did make me laugh on another thread when I was accused of being "wannabe PC middlie class". Seemed a bit of a crap insult really

Explain the class system to me, those of you who are so sure of the boundaries. I am Irish and I don't understand it.

I would have thought that if you were sufficiently educated and well-bred to be considered upper or upper middle class, you wouldn't be so crass as to label others according to education or occupation . Similarly, if you were a thick ignorant oik devoid of linguistic skills, you wouldn't particularly care what them upstairs thought of you with your "clunkingly obvious grammatical errors". Sigh.

This suggests to me as an outsider that, regardless of perceived and stated class boundaries, this thread best reflects the views of the working middle classes.

It's not really horseshit, it's a fact;, it's what a lot of "working class" people get upset about actually, that the perceived middle classes can afford a better education by paying directly for schools or indirectly for school addresses.

Offensive horseshit. No it isn't. It's right there in front of you.

Why are you imploding? Middle class people are historically better educated, which means they are more well read and well informed. If you are more well read and better informed than your working class friends then that is why they think you are middle class. It's not middle class people categorising working class people as thick, it's your own working class friends.

"I would have thought that if you were sufficiently educated and well-bred to be considered upper or upper middle class, you wouldn't be so crass as to label others according to education or occupation."

Isn't it her "working class" mates who are being crass enough so to label her?

I see your point, colditz, but I personally don't get cross about people's silly class perceptions of me. Whatever, as my five yr old would say .

I do like to shock people a bit when they think they know me - educated, articulate, a bookworm etc - and then drop in that I grew up on one of the roughest caaaaancil estates in London. People are ever so easily shocked.

Important life lesson for us all: Do NOT judge a book by it's cover.

Oh, and HOWLING at Xenia's: 'It does give the impression you went to state school'.

Brilliant.

This is so dumb. Stereotypes, shmeriotypes. Plenty of stereotyping of all classes goes on. Big deal.

To be honest it doesnt matter now. Most working class people are walking around thinking they middle class anyway because they wear a tie to work and got a few d's at A level and did some pointless degree in an old polytechnic. This apparently is social mobility..yeah right.. personally I call it a false conciousness and it suits those in power very well indeed.

I'm middle class and very proud !!! Very well read and with good life style, my spelling on the other hand is another subject all together ....

Appletrees, my point is that it seems to me, as an outsider to this whole system, that it is really only the working middle classes subscribe such reductive class stereotypes to those above and below them on the social ladder. No one else cares.

What is the working middle class? I have never heard that term before.

Appletrees

"Educated" (as opposed to "schooled") suggests an active involvement on the part of the pupil or student - i.e. that, not only did someone very clever tell you something, but that you understood it and took it in.

It is, indeed, true that historically the middle and upper classes have been better schooled; however, having attended university with a broad sample of them (and, later, taught them at university) I strongly dispute that they have any particular advantage in the educational sense.

Your point also overlooks, of course, the studies of working class students in night schools, via the public library system and other autodidactive strategies and under the auspices of the trades unions.

So I stand by the horse shit comment.

"because they wear a tie to work and got a few d's at A level and did some pointless degree in an old polytechnic." Like so many middle class people before them ...

Your distinction is a bit rubbish and not even salient. Class distinctions deal largely with the superficial. This is about wondering why there is a stereotype and why it exists. It's not the biggest mystery is it? It's usually education that makes the difference in that vagueworking/middle cross over. So the horseshit thing doesn't obtain.

MILFLAW yes those people in my mind are not 'middle class'..they still end up working in call centres and so are working class. Those that dont came from middle class families with connections and so were able to bullshit their way into a decent job. It is all pretty unfair and intelligent people sadly dont get the breaks as their parents are unable to move to a catchment area for a decent secondary education or pay for private tutors to enable their child to pass the 11 plus.

And there we have it. Stereotypes, education resentment, class prejudice. Twas ever thus.

Appletrees its not stereotypes it is a fact. Levels of social mobility are not what people would like to think.

It's not education. It's qualifications or the status of the school or university or former poly. Or, if you prefer, MONEY.

Are you honestly claiming that someone who attends Oxford on one of the made-up courses regularly used to recruit national-standard rowers and rugby players is automatically better "educated" than someone who left school at the age of 16 and is a voracious reader? Yet there is no doubt that he or she will have a wider access to careers and hence wealth and power. And so the situation perpetuates itself: working class children, because poor, are expected to fail - because, if they were likely to be successes, why aren't their parents rich?

You seem to have a very woolly concept of what education actually IS. But I nevertheless bow before your superior middle-class knowledge.

"MILFLAW yes those people in my mind are not 'middle class'..they still end up working in call centres and so are working class. Those that dont came from middle class families with connections and so were able to bullshit their way into a decent job. It is all pretty unfair and intelligent people sadly dont get the breaks as their parents are unable to move to a catchment area for a decent secondary education or pay for private tutors to enable their child to pass the 11 plus."

Before the polys were ex polys and before higher education became practically obligatory, what do you think they were full of? Miners' and charwomen's kids? Or the children of middle class and upper class families who, though academically weak, were expected to go to some form of higher education?

Yes because the standard of education and teaching is far superior in ivory or red bricks. They will certainly be better educated but that does not mean they are more intelligent.

MIFLAW..totally agree they were full of weak middle class kids. Now they are full of both, but at least the working class kids have the excuse that they were disadvantaged in that they went to a comprehensive with low levels of attainment and never had the cultural capital invested in them in the same way middle class children do.