To think people underestimate impact of advantages

[brasty]

I think lots of people underestimate the impact of advantages in their life.
So having parents who value education and encourage you.
Having parents who find the best school for you.
Having loving parents who create a loving environment to grow up in.
Getting help with house deposits.
Having a parent who will help you out when things go wrong.

All or some of these things makes it so much easier to have a good life. Yet so many people underestimate the impact.

unlimiteddilutingjuice excellent points on changing attitudes.

I agree the pain and damage of a bad parenting is very hard to overcome. If you get the breaks then sure, it is possible but it is a massive disadvantage which shows itself more the harder life becomes.

Also: People not valuing education....

When I really break it down and look at it rationally; I do not value education. Or at least I don't value it, on its own, as a means of class mobility.

You get greater class mobility at times of greater class equality. The generation of working class kids coming out of red brick universities in the 60's and 70's and moving into the middle classes, will have had friends back home working in manufacturing and trades who were also seeing their living standards rise.

Whats going on now, is that the middle class in contracting, social inequality is growing and middle class people are responding by erecting a "glass floor" made of all the educational advantages they can buy with their superiour money, time and social capital.
Its reached the point of an unwinnable educational arms race.

Pouring their personal effort into education, is not the solution its made out to be for working class parents and children.
In some ways its more of an adaptive behaviour to the circumstances of being middle class.

i agree with all the posters on here! it is very complex.

Thanks quercuscircus
I agree about bad parenting. Its a terrible thing to experiance, whatever other advantages or disadvantages you may have

When I left school in the 70s there was 3 million unemployed. All around me i had people telling me that there was no point applying for jobs as so many were unemployed. The negativity was oppressive.
I applied for jobs, I walked into cafes, newsagents asking for work and worked for a pittance. I took no notice of the people around me who said it wasn't worth working an 8 hour shift for less than £8 The way I looked at it was there are 24 hours in a day. I might sleep for 8 hours and travel for 2 hours per day. That left 14 hours to work.
14 hours at £1 per hour for a week meant I could earn nearly £100 per week.

Wasn't able to.work that much but I damn near tried and ended up buying my first house at 18.

Just because you start off poor and your parents don't speak English and are not supportive and have everything against you doesn't mean you have to give up and stay poor.

My dd has friends from near to where I grew up. They consider themselves poor and belate that everything is against them.
There is no point in trying because....

When dd pointed out they couldn't be that poor because they could afford to.smoke, buy bottles of vodka and none have any part time jobs they tell her that they won't work for less than £100 per day. Dd has multiple jobs and one she does pays under £20 per day.

For some people in that situation it makes me angry that they with no reason in the world choose to waste time and money rather than get up and do something it.

The only advantage I had was I was physically fit, although a few years before I had been given 6 weeks to live and I was lucky that the treatment is received was the actual treatment not a placebo

I very much recognise all the advantages I had growing up. Even as a teenager I could recognise how different my life could have been with a different childhood and later, with different choices I made. But the fact is that I had choices, many did not.

Putting aside the main issue of the childhood advantages themselves. I know of many people who did have all those advantages and who haven't made much of a success of themselves in terms of happiness, life and finances. So maybe within the group of 'advantaged individuals' there are people with more talent, hard work, focus etc. And when an advantaged person says 'I got here through my own hard work' that is what they mean, not that they are comparing themselves like for like with someone from an abusive home, poverty or deprived background. Likewise among people from disadvantage there will be people who work hard and have great talent and ability who do manage to reach great success.

I guess you simply can't compare advantaged people with disadvantaged people. But you can recognise that within both groups there are some people who work harder, longer, and with more talent and insight than others.

Despite advantage in life I think people are fine to be proud of their achievements because being advantaged doesn't mean all of your achievements mean nothing. But I do think it's important that all people are aware and sympathetic to the effect of privillage on society.

unlimited I agree completely with what you say at 13:48:24.

dilutingjuice

Excellent points. The contempt for the working classes is pretty apparent - just read the guardian... they are a problem to be solved (and patronised) rather than a section of society that is valuable but being failed. No one at the top of the tree has any real desire to see more equality in society, imho.

Education is an interesting one. The areas of work that truly need real serious smarts and education (I'm thinking things like theoretical physics, sciences, high level engineering) do tend to be quite meritocratic. But not a route to riches.

Inequality is the theme that underpins all this. Our society is grossly unequal at a fundamental level and the powers that be have zero interest in real change. Look at brexit. If you think that people at the top have any interest in lowering migration you're deluded. Migration means a bigger more exploitable workforce, which means lower worker protections, lower wages etc and further entrenchment of the Status quo,

I don't think we will ever have true equality - look at what happens when societies enforce it. Not good. But what we should strive for is equality of opportunity and less structural inequality. Think of the talent and potential we miss by writing off so many people.

It IS very complex - and people's characters have a lot to do with how they play the hand they're dealt.

Different siblings in families can have very different lives, according to choices they make as much as opportunities they have - and it's not necessarily down to difference in ability either.

Interesting article I read recently about Canada - their schooling system has become one of the best in the world, and one of the reasons is that they take pains to overcome pupils' circumstantial inequalities and give them equal ops in the education system.
www.bbc.com/news/business-40708421

Thank you pekingfairy

"The areas of work that truly need real serious smarts and education (I'm thinking things like theoretical physics, sciences, high level engineering) do tend to be quite meritocratic. But not a route to riches."

Interestingly, I've heard the same said about law, by a barrister from a working class background. He said you tend not be be disadvantaged by interpersonal factors because "if your argument stands up then your argument stands up"

Of course you have to get to be a barrister first......His advice, if anyone is interested, is to pick a neglected area of law that noone else is interested in and just get really, really geeky about it.
He spends his career defending people accused of benefit fraud.

The old boy and girl network is working just fine and always has.
same with nepotism.

FFS, outliers and exceptions do not break rules of social averages! Why is this hard to understand? Just because a few poorer people succeed does not mean that there is no problem or that disadvantage can always be conquered by hard work. Why keep repeating anecdotal evidence in the face of really quite a lot of evidence and statistics to the contrary? It's just some stupid myth of individualism.

Here's the thing about disadvantage: it's not just being poor, being cold, being more likely to be ill. It's also prejudice. Just as there are biases against race and gender, there are biases against class. People employ people who look, feel, speak and act like them - and they also directly discriminate and turn these into voiced prejudices.
Our whole system is geared towards differential entry. There are barriers to university entry in the form of grades that are far easier to get at a fee-paying or selective school than at a comprehensive (even though working class kids at the same grades have been shown to do better at university once they arrive). Access to top universities is still disproportionately middle class. There are further barriers to professional entry in the form of prejudices against accents, dress, ways of being. Studies have shown that even successful people from disadvantaged people can be paid less than middle class colleagues - by 17% according to a recent study by the Social Mobility Commission: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/david-johnston1/social-mobility_b_14411920.html. What is more, elite firms are also very biased against working class applicants (www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/15/poshness-tests-block-working-class-applicants-at-top-companies)

The thing I would say about valuing education is that it can be an opportunity to see a life that is different from your own. To see examples of behaviour and values and ways of thinking that may change your outlook - for good or bad I suppose - but that one hopes it would be for good. I still believe hope that good teachers might in some way make up for bad parents. Sometimes all it takes is for one person to be a good role model and the upward spiral can begin.

olivers and there is your advantage - you could see a way of behaving that would be advantageous to you whereas others so could not see it. I'm not sure what the outcome would have been if the 3 million others had behaved exactly as you did though.

There will always be exceptions to the rule. I think we need the ability to look both at our own individual actions and behaviours, and at the issues affecting the actions and behaviour of society and sections of society, without thinking of them as "them" or "other", but as "us" - "humans".

But also, I think the prevailing theories and interpretations of this have actually been wrong and mis-guided eg certain economic theory etc and based on incorrect assumptions about behaviour. I can't put this into more technical arguments I need as the names and thoughts etc are stuck somewhere inside my head! Maybe someone else will know :)

YANBU at all.

quercus - you're assuming you can 'behave' your way out of structural disadvantage prejudice. I'm sorry, but it's like saying women can behave their way out of sexual assault.

Class is a very real, very structural, very much alive barrier in this country.

*structural disadvantage AND prejudice, sorry.

I am pretty sure that when I was a child being beaten and neglected by violent and alcoholic parents, ending up in a dysfunctional and oppressive care system where there were no expectations of me I didn't consider being born white and in the U.K. an advantage at all.

I'm also pretty sure that when I was kicked out of care at the age of 17 with no support, nowhere to go and with just £20 in my pocket that I didn't feel lucky.

I do however feel lucky now because of the choices I made then and because of something in me that was determined to drag myself out of the life I had led until that point.

It's not as simple for the majority of people to be so black and white about their lives. As someone earlier pointed out you can have all the advantages given to you and still not do anything with them or achieve what you want to achieve.

I have friends who were in the same care system as me, they had the same low or non existent expectations as me and now, unlike me, they are living the stereotypical life that others would expect of people with their backgrounds - no job or minimum wage job, lots of children, dysfunctional or abusive partners, a life on benefits with no hope of getting out of that poverty. I have friends who, on the surface had charmed lives, interested parents, good education and opportunities for social mobility who are depressed, anxious and underachieving. Neither of these two groups consider themselves lucky.

I, on the other hand, would actually be quite pissed off if people put all of my achievements down to pure luck, or assumed I had had greater advantage than them. Yes i was lucky in terms of the outcomes, but I did it myself. I made very concious choices and decisions by myself, for myself, in order to achieve the life I wanted when I could have just as easily become another person who lived up to the expectations people had of someone in my position.

It's way too complex to tidy up all neatly into little packages. Too many variables to compare with others. Having a chip on Ones shoulders about people who have more than yourself inevitably creates a them an us situation where people start their sentences with "but it's not fair...because they had xy or z"

Sorry that was very rambling, a jumble of thoughts from my head that sounded coherent to me

What ever advantage I had came from me not from other people. There were others who did do the same as me and got themselves out of there situation but there were others who preferred to go out and have a good time.
I think the worse you have it growing up means that you either fly or fall. The ones who didn't make it out were the ones who had parents who did give them everything. The hunger to change your situation when it wasn't that bad wasn't there to the extent that living in a chaotic poverty stricken unsupportive household was there

bemused Am l? I will think about that. I do think that there is massive structural disadvatge and prejudice (see my previous post).

I am not very good at organising my arguements anymore becasue of my brain so it is possible that I am not expressin myself well because I need to take much more time to compose what I am saying, so please bear that in mind!

I do think it is possible to behave in certain ways that can overcome a bad situation or respond differently that may have a better outcome.. and agree re thumbwithces re siblings.

But I generally think that if you outperform you class/ socio-economic group this is a combination of the luck of the chararcteristics you are born with or some other random factor such as a book read or another quirk of fate.

I was being a bit sarcastic when replying to olivers re seeing what others couldn't. But it is true that olivers behaviour bucked the trend, and who can say exactly why that happened - it will be a range of factors and influences.

And some may argue that in doing so they merely gave in to the trap of devaluing themselves and of working for nothing and so help to perpetuate the race to the bottom economic policies of the ruling classes. But others see it as rising above the negativity and learned helplessness of poverty stricken sections of society.

I think it is probably a bit of both - as I was discussing with Zaurak not just one thing, but many and complex interactions and reactions.

I absolutely agree that it would be much better to not have destructive trends and traps/ structural barriers in the first place.

Yes predudice is alive and well. Turned down for another job - feedback well it's not your time, you have small children!

And to clarify, I have also overcome things but also see that my ability to do so where others eg re siblings, is not is not because I am intrinsically better, but just more lucky that I possess somethings in me that meant I had different reactions to the same circumstances eg not developing anorexia, and therefore I could make different choices.

But then siblings are often not treated at all equally in dysfunctional families, so you could argue that that is the difference that provoked a different response and outcome on behaviour. It is complex. And either way, not of my conscious doing!

But it is swings and roundabouts. Where I have something different, a sibling will have a difference too.

That's a whole different topic Head. But I'm so sorry about that. Fuckers have no right to make it about your private life.

I do think Quercus has a point about education.

It's not so much what you learn but the world you enter.

When I went to uni at 18 I was a poor student from a very modest background. When I got there the other students were like alien beings - they inhabited a world I just hadn't known existed before. I mean I knew of course that other lives were out there but I'd never seen it and I'd never experienced it. It was a huge eye opener. And I saw how those people behaved and reacted and it was different to me. They expected to go and succeed. It was their default assumption. I'd struggled (not academically, but against the assumption that what was the point which was my schools attitude) and had no idea how I'd do there.

I look back and I see that was when I lost my accent. I now work internationally and I've been told I'm 'hard to place' which means in code 'I have no idea how posh you are.' Forriners say they like how my accent is clear and correct. They are baffled in the main by the English class system.

It shouldn't be like that but it is. I think education is as much a glimpse of another role as it is factual knowledge.

Education can show you another world but you have to feel like that world has some use or relevance to you.
I ended up doing my degree almost 10 full years after I first had the opportunity because I was too busy fucking about in squats and going to raves.
With the benefit of hindsight: I felt the need to escape the constant low level anti social behaviour directed towards my family on the estate I grew up in.
I didn't feel like Univeristy would have provided an adequate escape (people did suggest it...) because I was such a freak and a natural target for bullying that I couldn't possibly be around people my own age.
I eventually did the OU in adulthood.