This thread is prompted by a comment I read on another thread here:-
To ask why two London boroughs send more kids to Oxbridge than the entirety of Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester combined?
where a poster said:-
I don't quite understand it when people create or perpetuate their own class barriers instead of knocking them down.
Which made me stop and think and realise that, yes, there are lots of people that really don't understand some of the reasons why many don't do this or are unable to do this.
It was also prompted by talking to an old friend whose DD is currently in year 9. The DD is interested in some sort of medical career but when I was talking to her she was just thinking of being a nurse. The whole idea of her even thinking about becoming a doctor was so far outside of her comprehension that she had never considered it once. (For context though, the school she attends had only 18% of pupils get at least a grade 5 in maths and English in last year's GCSEs - the average in England was 43%).
So, just to explain why I do understand this I'll tell you about myself (this is why I've name changed for this).
Just to put things in context, my mother left school at age 15 without any qualifications and started work the very next week in the typing pool at the offices of the local electricity board. This was very much what was "expected" of young girls of her background in the 1950s. She then became a computer for the electricity board. By the way that isn't a typo; back then "computer" was a job title not a machine.
After she married and gave birth to me and my brother in the mid 60s she didn't work again until the late 70s (at the time, this was not unusual).
Various studies have shown that a major indicator of future success for children is mother's prior academic achievement (ie children of better educated mothers tend to do better in later life than those of less well educated mothers - father's education isn't as important - all other things being equal).
When I took my O-Level exams in the early 80s around 75-80% of people would leave school at age 16. Boys who had done particularly well might get apprenticeships as apprentice toolmakers or engineers; for most girls getting a "nice" office job was seen as a real prize.
Although, please don't think that the school was responsible for this gender divide. We were the first comprehensive intake into an ex-secondary modern school (Our Local Authority had just changed from being selective and we were the first year not to take the 11+) and it was a school that was in a very working class area and was set up to teach practical skills as much as academic ones. The expectation was very much set about the expected destinations of pupils at the school.
Certainly everybody was required to do metalwork and woodwork; cookery and needlework. However, my attempts at both a wooden aeroplane and a stuffed soft toy were equally terrible. But, despite this, it was very clear that, when given a choice, boys overwhelmingly chose technical drawing and girls chose typing. (by the way, can you even imagine nowadays a school offering technical drawing and typing as subjects in their own right?).
Even in the Sixth Form there really wasn't much in the way of role models (for boys or girls actually). The only two people I can remember with a clear goal was the Head Boy who wanted to become a lawyer (he ended up getting an unconditional offer - two Es - to study law at Cambridge and did go on to be very successful) and a girl who wanted to become a doctor ( but her father was a GP anyway - actually our family GP).
However, things really changed when I got to university. For the first time in my life I came across people who were extremely focused and driven, they knew what they wanted out of life and believed that they could get it (although there were equally a number that were just out for a good time and even some girls that were there to "catch" a potential husband - not joking).
What was the difference? Well, a lot of the people I met at university came from much more academically focused schools, private schools or just generally from a very upper-middle class background. They certainly hadn't learnt that a good job for a girl was a "nice" office job and they certainly hadn't been taught needlework or typing at school in order to prepare them for the workplace.
For example, in the Hall of Residence where I stayed in the first and third years there were quite a number of students from the various different London medical schools (there were a lot more individual medical schools back then). The one thing that they all had in common was a belief that any job or profession was open to them if they simply tried hard enough - I think that there were actually more women than men studying medicine, even back then, and it simply didn't occur to these girls to think any differently than that she could and would become a doctor. What they also had in common, was a rather different family and school background to mine
All very different from the sort of environment I had grown up in prior to going to university.
The sort of expectations and role models that you have when younger really can make a huge difference to believing what you are capable of doing. It really can be hugely difficult to even comprehend going to university when you’ve never met anyone who has.
My experience was decades ago but, speaking to people, the differences in expectations and role models carries on to this day (even if schools do no longer offer typing and "secretarial" skills as options) and is a very real thing.
Sorry that this post is so long but I just wanted to explain why I DO understand why people do things that others perceive as perpetuating their own class barriers.
I was just lucky and was one of the few that did overcome this but I could very easily not have gone on to university and have the life I've had. Members of my family are equally as smart as me and their lives have been really quite different.