Peer Influence

[Judy1234]

I as just thinking about this this morning when talking to my daughter about her clever but state educated boyfriend and how lower expectations and then I see the article in today's Times saying children are as much influenced by their peers (and genes) as by what parents do to them. Yet parents are blamed all the time for things their children do.

One thing you gain with good schools is the right peer pressure. In fact if I had to say one thing I paid for in their private schools it was the peer influence as teenagers.

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article4207274.ece

Some of the private schools my friends have attended have had (and still have) very serious drug problems- I wouldn't want my teenagers led astray by that. Other schools have had bad problems with anorexia and bullying. Our local state secondaries do not seem to have these problems on anything like the same scale.

Of course, I am aware that there are state schools that do- I just think it's too simplistic to believe that it's a simple state-private divide. Not all state schools, even in less affluent areas, are sink schools with out-of-hand pupils.

I don't think drugs problems are wore in private schools. I don't like boarding schools at all because parental influence, such as it is at teenage level, is diluted. There are probably more fears over personal safety, knives etc children of criminals in state schools than a child might risk in terms of drug addiction and possibility of eating disorders in private schools.

It is certainly the case that most parents try to choose better more middle class state schools with clever well behaved children, who wouldn't?

No fears over knives and personal safety that I ever heard of in our local state school, nor in the one dd will be going to.

Coming from a family that has worked its way up from working class origins on both my mother's and my father's side, I don't get this equation between clever and middle class. My Granddad never struck me as dim, nor does my Dad.

Many of dc's friends have parents with typical working class jobs, and you couldn't hope to see a nicer, better behaved bunch of kids. Some of them are rather clever, too. Probably got it through the genes. I imagine you'd have to be quite clever to be a skilled worksman.

I think it's a bit of a luxury to do a low paid job you love tbh. I'd love to be a poet but it wouldn't pay the bills and my family would starve without my well paid but boring job. Ditto dh. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with doing a low paid job you love btw, just that I didn't make that choice and that I personally therefore consider it a luxury. I don't work for the love of it, I work for the money to provide for my family. If I was single and childless I'd be doing something entirely different. ANd I'm sure that's true for a lot of main earners.

I haven't made the link between private schools and better peer pressure, I made the link between schools with good behaviour standards and peer pressure. I was pointing out that many people use private schools because they think they are buying better peers. I don't necessarily agree that private = 'better' or better behaved peers though. My children are probably going to state schools.

And given the choice between a school with good behaviour standards and one without I'd choose the one with good, I couldn't care less whether that's state or private tbh. Because I think peer influence does matter. And I do think I will prefer the influence in a school that insists on decent standards of behaviour, whether it's state or private.

My grandparents were working class, grandmother worked in a sausage factory, grandfather was a machine worker of some kind. They were both clever and not given the opportunity to use it in any way - they were working class, born in 1914 or so and univesity was just not one of their options. Grandparents on other side v working class too, but both died of TB (grandmother died in childbirth while having my father) as you did
in those days (1940s)

I certainly don't have any notions re working class = not clever. Not at all.

You are no doubt right, Waterwitch, it is a luxury and something to be grateful for. Still, I reckon if other families can survive on lowish wages, so can we. There is nothing specially extra precious about us that means that we would starve where another family would cope.

But Xenia's OP was about people not daring to have high enough ambitions. Dh and I have agreed to go for the (admittedly ludicrously high) ambition of doing the jobs we'd always dreamt of, even if this means a modest standard of living and a lack of job security. That's what I mean with high ambitions! Believing that if anyone can cope and make a go of it, then we can.

I am not saying that everybody should have high ambitions. It was Xenia who said that. All I am saying is, there may be more than one way of defining high ambitions.

If I'm honest Cory, I'm envious. I really want my children to do something they love but I also sort of hope it coincidentally involves enough money for them to have a decent (not amazing, just ok) standard of living. I've been very very poor and I've been relatively well off (I think we're reasonably off now) and I know which life I prefer. Given the choice I wouldn't work at all, am lazy cow at heart, but would still have enough money to do the things I like.

I am hoping we'll be able to give them enough as a decent start so they can make some choices that aren't purely based on money. (I'm one of those irritating Champagne socialists)

But I'm wandering off topic so apologies.

Well, I don't really know what is best, I just know what feels best for me. I love my work and couldn't imagine not doing it. But of course my children may have totally different ideas, and I hope I will be able to support them in whatever feels right for them, rather than projecting my own ideas iyswim.

Yes I expect it is different with teenagers (mine are both under 10) but I suppose I am hoping that we will have driven the message firmly home by then! Doesn't it work like that? Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic.

Of course peer pressure is huge.

At most state schools, it is not cool to achieve highly. It is hard to work and be called a nerd or swot as it was in my day.

If you are a weak character, you want to be popular and if that means performing poorly, then that is what you may do. And I know, I was the isolated swot.

I now think of those kids I went to school with as lowly. If that makes me a snob, so be it.

That is why we also pay. It is for the company just as much as the academic side of school.

"At most state schools, it is not cool to achieve highly. It is hard to work and be called a nerd or swot as it was in my day."

Errrr..... a sweeping generalisation I think.

In my school for example (large inner city state comp), the cool people were the swots. Though I admit that for boys it is often cooler to be good at sport than academia, but this applies to both private and state.

And why think of anyone of 'lowly'?!

Stopfighting on Sat 28-Jun-08 19:41:10

'I now think of those kids I went to school with as lowly.'

Which shows that state education can have different effects on different people. I do not think of other people as lowly just because their life choices have been different from mine. And I would feel I had failed as a parent if my dc's grew up thinking that way.

It is their attitudes which are lowly. Not their life choices.

Surely, the lowly thing about them was that they were bullies? What has that got to do with the educated/non-educated divide. Do you imagine that bullying does not happen in private schools? I have been bullied both in a state comprehensive (for being swotty) and in a private school well known for its caring ethos (for other reasons).

Bullying is a lowly thing. But there is no automatic correlation between bullying and lack of education/interest in education.

My dc's both attend a state school in a working/lower middle class area with lower than national average results, and neither of them suffers from bullying. Dd is not only a swot (reads Shakespeare and is working on her first novel) but is also disabled and incontinent. And comes from a family which has no car, no computer games and has only recently acquired a TV. You'd think there would be plenty of scope for bullying there- yet she is manifestly not being bullied. I seriously believe it is because they are nice kids.

I thought about this thread a lot over the w/end as I visited my huge extended working class family for a party and Cory is quite right - none of them seem dim. Some of the younger members got good if not great GCSEs so why do I remain the only one to have gone to Uni?
Their aspirations seemed to be the crux of it. No one dreamed of doing a job that they loved, well paid or otherwise.
Now some of that is to do with the economic situation and lack of employment generally which makes people grateful to be in work at all but much of it was just a lack of dreaming and hoping.
My cousin who has been made redundant for the third time simply intended to get another low paid job for another company who would treat him like shit. He was completely resigned to it.
As for the luxury of being a SAHM the women just laughed. They all worked because they could not have paid the bills otherwise.

Litchick has a very good point. Low aspirations are a problem.

But IME they are not confined to the working class.

I have known several people who have been educated in expensive private schools and who have gone into jobs in finance or marketing which they have hated and which were clearly wrong for them. These people just did what was expected of them, because they did not have the confidence to have dreams or aspirations of their own. To me, this is as sad as somebody taking a job stacking shelves because that's what their families expect of them. It is the ultimate in lack of ambition. Some of them have come to very tragic ends.

I had another friend, educated at one of the most expensive private schools in the country, who basically became a drop-out and did nothing at all for years, because he could not bear to fulfil his family's dreams for him and he had no dreams of his own. It was a very sad case of lack of confidence.

On the other hand, I myself come from two families where the love of learning, the excitement of finding things out, has been the motivator for working class boys to set out and find themselves a new and different future. Both my Dad and my maternal Grandfather half starved themselves (literally!) through higher education because of their dreams. They both became teachers, so hardly the leaders of the country Xenia is talking of, but the glow of fulfilling their dream has remained with them all their lives and has made them very inspiring people. Totally different from my poor friend whose only dream was so completely negative.

Sorry, Litchick, I didn't mean to trivialise your family's problems. I know there are special difficulties that beset people from a working class background and that in a sense people from well-off families may seem to have it all on a plate. But IME having it all on a plate doesn't necessarily equal ambition either.

Anyway, we are discussing state schools (I think, though this thread seems to be meandering off in all sort of directions). And my dc's are not finding them uninspiring places.

I think dd is even more convinced of the value of her dream because it can only be understood by maybe one or two of the children in her year. At the same time, I am pleased to say that she respects the outlook of the other children too. But then her dream is to be a writer- so she needs to be interested in different outlooks

How do you define high ambitions though. I know some people would say it's about magic circle law firms and a million pounds a year. But some people are motivated by quite different things. I think knowing yourself and believing you can achieve and being able to create a road map to your goals are vital for children. And adults really. And I don't think those qualities are found only in private educated children. It's about having parents who can do it, who can live like that.

Exactly. If somebody was educated at Latymer's, or even Marlborough, and their real dream was to become a skilled carpenter, then I would say that was a high ambition. And if they decided to become a merchant banker instead because that's what their Dad and uncles had done, then I'd say they were lowering their ambitions.