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"

you could have left the last two words off that sentence

Would someone tell me then please, in a non-patronising non-insulting way, using positive characteristics, what it is to be working class?

Oh no! The call is out for definitions of class.

Ummm

When you work by the hour, and don't shop at Waitrose, and wouldn't ever consider using pickle instead of chutney.

I think.

I want to know this too!

Two friends of mine have fallen out because one of them said something negative about someone else being working class, and one of them took great offence despite the fact she earns double what the other friend does, owns her own home while the other friend rents and is currently a SAHM on the strength of her own savings while the friend who made the offending comment has had to return to work on working tax credits!.

GivesHeadlessHorseman re your comment ''I never understand this logic to be honest. The level of attainment at any school is set by the pupils in it. It's like blaming your scales for the fact you are too fat''. RIGHT..so you have the same chances in life if you go to a comprehensive in a rough part of an inner city as you do if you go to Eaton. Those schools are rubbish for a number of reasons and it is NOT the fault of the pupils there that they are at a disadvantage.

I am Geordie born and bred. I spent the my teen years going out a lot in Newcastle town centre. I think virtually every time I went out I had to convince somebody I was really a Geordie despite my voice that verges on RP. 'Wherra ye fram laike?' followed me around until I left for Manchester poly-where my short 'a' and long 'oo' convinced all the southerners on my course that I was authentic!

Cor, this is fascinating stuff. colditz I agree now I've read your life history that you are ideed working class. Lower middle on a good day.

Your few wildly exasperated posts after that made me chuckle - and I can see your point.

MIFLAW Red: working 'up' being acceptable but 'educating' up implying that you cannot have an education and yet reamin WC is an interdting point. All I would say to that is that as a general rule most people who attain in education go on to attain more financially than their non-educated counterparts, so there the two become inxtricably linked and are really one and the same.

However, someone who was born WC and attained through education (let's say as doctor, teacher, solicitor, accountant) will be perceived as MC through and through by virtue of their job, and level of education, whereas someone born WC who makes millions through trade/entrepreneurship will probably always be seen as being WC-cum- nouveau riche. But that should suit Colditz!

Scroobi agree completely that the parameters have changed so much in the last 30 years particularly, that it is almost impossible to put everyone in a definitive category as narrow as WC, LMC, MMC, UPM, UC now. That's why we have acorn groups. they make fascinating reading, but even thye are sometimes flawed.

All of that is a good thing, surely?

Dad a policeman, grew up in a semi, went to the local schools.

Nothing about that says working class to me either.

There is no agreed definition of each class so it's really not worth trying to get definitive answers. It's all down to perception and if someone is perceived to be middle class by some others, there's not much can be done about it.

No catholic it is not the fault of the pupils that they are disadvantaged. And I can understand entirely why a child from a school full of disadvantaged kids (or in fact any fairly average or even pretty good state to good school) may not attain to the same level as an equally bright or equally dim child at Eton. But what I don't get is the argument that WC often fail in education becasue they have attended a school full of other WC kids. In the state system at least, all kids get to go to schools roughly similar for the same amount of time and are taught from the same curriculum. If MC kids are consistently outperforming WC kids then it has to be about more than the school. No-one looks you up and down aged 11 and says 'Right, you appear to be WC so you get the weak school with the poor results.'

You amy want to think that's how it wroks, but it patently doesn't. Do you honestly think that if I went to the 'best' comrephensive and the 'worst' in my town, and swapped all the children over en-masse that in three years time the results tables for each school would look the same as before?

Yes MC kids have parents who push them that is why they out perform them. It is quite simple and has nothing to do with their innate ability. MC kids have the benefit of cultural capital..wc kids dont!

'Those schools are rubbish and it's not the fault of the pupils that they are disadvantaged'.

No, but it is the fault of the level of disadvantage apparent in the pupils that the school may be perceived as rubbish. Therefore to say that those from disadvantaged or WC backgrounds can blame their lack of attainment on the school they went to, is too simplistic.

No it is multifaceted but the fact remains take one of those kids and put them in a fee paying school they will obtain better grades so the school is worse whatever the reasons for that maybe. If you were working class and went to a school were teachers are bullshitting you that a D and E are a pass and that you will be university educated and a high achiever if you go and do film studies in a ex poly then you can blame your lack of attainment on the school. Besides a lot of the teachers who work in state schools are the ones with pretty awful academic credentials themselves. Go to a good private school some of the teachers are oxbridge and the 'worst' are redbrick. They have gone into teaching for the love and passion of the job rather than the holidays or for want of a better idea.

What you are saying is that WC kids are to blame if they fail academically and actually that really isnt the case and to say that implies they are innately less intelligent than their middle class counterparts..get real..that is eugenics!

catholic

So we are not blaming the school after all then? WE are blaming the relative values of the WC v. MC parents' cultural capital now?

So back to colditz's original point, she is clearly giving off MC cultural capital pheromones left right and centre - although she maintains she hasn't a MC bone in her body, or had any undue advantage in life. If she ceased to speak in a language that MC people identified with (that's a metaphor BTW, but you could argue it should be taken literally as well) she'd be truer to her WC roots, because a WC cultural capital by its very nature is the perceived as the 'weaker currency'.

OK, colditz there is your answer. The whole idea of a weak WC cultural capital is a construct devised by the ruling elite to keep the proles in their place, poor and uneducated, and incapable of competing irrespective of their innate intelligence. And they are trained from birth not to step out of their mould or challenge the status quo.

Their mould is clearly in the shape of an inarticulate cloth-head with few social skills. And you are not fitting it! Hence your new MC label.

There is no such thing as WC cultural capital? You are just posting facetious remarks which are not getting the gist of what anyone is saying.

Where did I say that?

Sorry, but I'm still laughing at Xenia saying one shouldn't split infinitives or start a sentence with 'But' and to do so marks one out as a prole.

Presumably, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen were working class then? In fact, that includes everybody who existed before the "don't begin a sentence with 'and' or 'but'" 'rule' came in, probably during the mid-19th century.

Snort!

I think things have changed.

In the past, and certainly before the widespread expansion of higher education in the 60s, there was a strong tradition of a working class intelligentsia. My Dad was one of these. A supremely clever and cultured autodidact who assembled car parts for nearly 50 years.

That has gone I think. No longer are there art schools in mining villages (nor are there many mines! Another story..)or philosophy clubs in Midlands car factories. Or lovely men like Dad who pronounced Descartes like Des Lynam and left oily thumb prints on his copy of Leviathan.

...this is because most (not all, but a large proportion) of those with the capacity and interest to pursue such interests may do so through the means of formal education, and thus have 'graduated' (if a graduation it is) to an expanded 'middle class'.

...and I'm one of these, I suppose.

It doesn't make me better than my Dad (Lord knows it doesn't do that. Few people are) but it does make things different.

..it means that people who have the manners and education of the OP are know definitely perceived to have left the working class, by working class folk too, and I think everyone is the poorer for it.

You said it above. I am not going to engage in a debate with you as you are clearly a right winger who thinks people who are poor or disadvantaged have brought it all on themselves because like you previously alluded, they are lazy and cant be arsed getting out of bed.

I have read your comments on this thread www.mumsnet.com/Talk/in_the_news/1062648-Does-coming-from-a-deprived-background-really-seal-your-fate/AllOnOnePage

Quite frankly you talk twaddle and have limited understanding of the forces at work which trap people in their social class. To suggest there isnt a two tier system in terms of schooling is delusional to say the least, especially when the grammar school system exists in many parts of the country.

Colditz to be fair it is only your chavy mates who think you are 'middle class coz u dnt rite yr texts lyke dis'. You have posted this thread as you want people to tell you how socially upwardly mobile you are!

You are actually far too culturally parochial to be educated or middle class and that was all too apparent on your little rant about circumcision the other week.

So ultimately I wouldn't worry about it. At 26 with two children no one is going to confuse you with societies elite.

erm OP

The three main things define class

1)education
2)accent
3)aspiration

if you are well spoken and educated, then that may make you MC whether you like it or not.

and dad a policeman, state school - lived in semi = probably MC too.

..unless that is you go by the journalists definition of MC, which just means someone wealthier, less tolerant and less cool than them. Even fairly wealthy journalists use this definition, but as 43% of the nation is MC but poorer than most journalists this shows how deluded some people are about class.

and i do care about split infinitives.

Yes catholic I am a right winger (but not too far right of centre since you ask) but I'm still here talking to you in spite of your left leanings. Shame you can't grow up and do the same. Funny, there was a thread about exactly these kinds of attitudes the other day.

I categorically did NOT say that there is no such think as a WC culture capital. You just wish I had because it justifies your need to dismiss me out of hand.

You are the one who said 'MC kids have the benfit of culture capital and WC kids don't.'

Forgive me, but make up your mind. Do they or don't they?

You are the one who brough the Culture Capital Theory into this, so do you agree that the very concept of Culture Capital assumes that the ruling elite (by their own cynical manipulation of what the lower orders) have devised a 'currency' system, whereby theirs is the most valuable 'currency' to trade in the big race to the top?

(by way of everything from education to useful career connections to exclusive access to the 'secret codes' that mark them out as MC or UC.)

Hence the UC have a place on the starting blocks, while the MC jostle for position behind them, and the WC with their less valuable currency languish in the crowd at the back.

Assuming you do agree, I was making the point that by your own argument about the CC Theory, Colditz has clearly been the recipinet of some Culture Capital above her station!

RetiredGoth That was a fantastic post and I agree wholeheartedly with every word.

No I said to you there is no such thing as WC cultural capital. What is this 'currency' that the WC have you speak of?

To be fair Coldtiz has not been the recipient of anything she is just wanting to be told how grand she is for not using text speak.

But that is not the argument ..the thing I disagree with you on is your view of education. Yes state schools are full of shit teachers a lot of the time. There is a two tier system, there is a grammar system in many parts of the country. It is nice and easy for you to lay the blame at the door of the disadvantaged and tell them it is their own fault..makes it easy not to have a social conscience then doesn't it.

I hope personally that people like yourself will suffer miserably under the government you elected. Sad thing is you think its in your interests because you are that deluded about your own position in society. I bet you did well under a Labour government too!

I'm sorry to split hairs catholic but you said immediately after my post

'there is no such thing as WC culture capital?'

The ? being the important thing. By phrasing it as a question I assumed you were questioning me on a point that I had made. Sorry if I misunderstood, but what else could I do, under the circumstances?

I'm just using the term 'currency' as an metaphor for what capital culture supposedly gives you - ie. advantage. So the UC and MC as invested with that advantage as children, and it 'buys' them further advantage throughout life. From what I understand it is not that there is no WC culture capital as such, only that it is of less value to them. But again - splitting hairs. It doesn't change the argument terribly much.