Does coming from a deprived background really seal your fate?

[Pinkjenny]

Just wondering, really, listening to Nick Clegg on R5 live. I come from Anfield in Liverpool, not deprived really, but certainly not affluent. My mum worked in a shop, and my dad was (and still is) an engineer.

I credit all of my success (relatively speaking, of course) to the way in which I was brought up, and the attitude of my parents, who told me I could be whatever I wanted to be, as long as I put my mind to it.

Does giving children money for their first shoes and first suit really help break that poverty cycle?

Or does it depend on the attitude of their parents and their general upbringing?

Good luck to them in their A'Levels I hope they do well.

usualsuspect: they stand no chance with attitudes like yours which aboslutely refuse to acknowledge or accept reality

Appletrees Oh I know the reality ,I don't just quote statistics and facts and feel all smug and superior

In a way, due to my own circumstances I think it does. I was very bright as a child, my parents were also very bright. We grew up in a council house with ice on the inside of windows etc (stereotype).

I went to a shit catholic school, which was the best of the shit schools in the area.

At it's worst, there were lads actually getting pissed/stoned in the classroom, smoking out of the windows etc. Every single lesson was disrupted by (generally boys) taking the piss.

I have no idea why my parents didn't send me to a better school.

I did manage to get decent GCSE results, god know's how, we couldn't even take the maths higher paper.

I went on to get excellent A-levels.

I then fucked up my life, little by little.

I know lots of people who had shit A-level results, I know for a fact I am brighter than them at their subjects.

They were "middle class" had tutors and parental support who have done way better than me.

I think the main thing they have is confidence. My mindset is inferior, no matter what I do or wear. I know nothing about opera or Dostoyevsky, humanities seems to be valued more in girls.

I do Ou courses (science and maths) but still feel inferior, women who know more about the arts seem to be valued.

I'M just LMAO that there are all these people out there who believe Britain offers equal opportunity to children and the only thing barring those childrens' way to an elite position in society is their parents.

Xenia is the closest to the truth in that she acknowledges it's not equal, but with a disclaimer that it's better than in other countries.

Yes, it's better than the US, definitely.

BUt it's a long long way from equal.

"Very few people look at their newborn baby boy and say that he'll probably have been in prison at least once by the time he is 30. Many people look and hope he'll go to college. If few go to college from the area where they live, then they hope, they dream, he'll be the one, their baby will be the exception.

A watered-down version of these dreams led parents in many of the few parts of England where the couple of hundred overtly selective state schools remain to vote in recent years to keep selective state schooling, a majority locally believing that their children were in the top fifth of some ability range consisting of all state-educated children who lived nearby.

To believe that your children are in the top fifth requires first to believe that there is a top fifth. AT any one time you can subject a group of children to testing and a fifth can be singled out as doing best. That fifth will be slightly more likely than their peers to rank in the top fifth in any other related test, but that does not mean that there is an actual top fifth that is waiting to be identified.

The higher the correlations between different tests, the more the same children come to be selected in the top fifth under different test regimes. THe more this happens, the more they will have been coached to perform well, the more likely they will be to live in a society that takes the idea of such testing seriously, a society, from government to classroom, that implicitly accepts the idea of inherent differences in ability. It is the smallest of steps from that position to accept that what you think is inherent is inherited.

From putting prize winners on pedastals, to putting whole populations in prisons, how we treat each other reveals how we see each other.

Thinking that you and your child are special and are likely to climb to the top is a very dangerous way to think. THe steeper the slope to the top, the fewer the places on the pinnacle, the more likely your dreams are to be dashed. The result of taking such thinking to an extreme means that in a majority of schools in the US where a minority of pupils are white, armed police are now permanently stationed at the school. Schools in poorer areas of the US now routinely identify and exclude students they as as being on the 'criminal justice track.' (meaning on the way to prison). By doing this they cause these children to start along a route that makes such predictions a near certainty.

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MOre obtusely,[in the 80s to 90s in the UK] the affluent tended to be opposed to those who would raise their taxes to fund educational changes to lower the barriers to others' children. Did their own children thank them for this? Occasionally in those years you might have heard a young adult say how grateful their were for the 'sacrifices' their parents had made in sending them to a fee-paying school, but you heard such stories less and less over time as it became more obvious that being able to afford to make such a 'sacrifice' was hardly a state of privation .

DAniel Dorling, pp79 and 82

That last sentence encapsulates it all.

The reason some people want to insist that all that counts is parental input is because deep down they know that if all children really did have equality of opportunity, then their own children would lose their privileged position in society.

Shall we throw out the two-tier system and allow all children the same opportunities?

Nah, let's keep it the way it is and pretend the only reaon some children end up in prison/on the check out of Maccy D's forever/ or pregnant for want of any better goal in life is because of the parents . Not because of an elitist, classist society... or so the thinking goes.

Believing the American dream, that some children can make it out if they would only just try or if their parents would pull their finger out, is what people tell themselves in order to jusify the inequalities

Of course it isn't equal but it is quite possible to do well, and parental influence is by far the most important. I am tracing my family history and we went from very poor agricultural labourers to professional jobs in a couple of generations.

Or I should say-careers rather than jobs.

As I've said before my own background shows that financial poverty is not a barrier to having a better life, what I believe is a barrier are poor family values and aspirations. My parents were financially poor immigrants who came to the UK 35 years ago, myself and my siblings spoke no english when we started school but we all ended up in the top stream in secondary school. We all got good O & A levels, went onto university and are now in professional careers. We attribute this to our parents' belief that we would do well academically . They provided as much support as they could but we knew we had to work hard to achieve our potential. I knew I was going to university from a young age while most of my friends wanted to work in shops and factories like their parents.

Sakura, I have never said I am not equal. All people on the planet are equal. Some are obviously different from others - male female etc. Some are brighter. Some are pretty. But we are all equal before the law.

Okay, let's look at CoinOperated because that's a rather sad post and let's sort it out. As mumzy says it's parental expectation which has a huge impact and your peer group at school too. If 100% go to good universities you are more likely to. Teenagers listen to their friends not their parents so get them in with a good peer group and you've done half the work.

So why did Coins mess up life thereafter? Confidence - she says. Can't that just be found now? I wonder what gives people confidence. Is it just being loved as a child rather than told you are useless so and so and total failure which is the attitidue of a lot of parents at all levels, even of children who are quite bright and in good schools. Is it something you're born with? Is it your positoin in the family - I'm oldest and quite confidence that I am or can be good. Is it how you deal with set backs. I've had lots of failures and things that haven't worked but I dust myself off and get up immediately and try something else.

So you know nothing about Opera? Does that matter? Or if it does to you just go and look up about it. I haven't been to that many operas, in fact only a few as a child although I like to sing songs from operas sometimes and I suppose that came from my childhoood although even then I had piano but no singing lessons (I'm a pretty good singer but that's natural and genetic) so any knowledge of opera singing etc would have come of my own initiative largely and through interest. Literature - well we can all take ourselves off to the library and read surely.

What I do find with people (and it's usually men because I'm single etc) is if they have had a bad education they don't know a whole heap of things and that can make it harder to talk to them but why is that so? What stops people learning now. I am sure I learn things every day and have huge gaps but I can fill them when I choose.

Sakura thank you so much for posting those sections. I will have to read that book.

For me, the theory of Cultural Capital springs to mind. You see, it's not so much that parents of 'high achieving children' are more loving or more committed, it's that they know how to work the system to their advantage.

It would be interesting to do an experiment! Take a large group of privileged children and educate one quarter of them at private day school, one quarter at private boarding school and one quarter at the local comprehensive and one quarter at grammar scool. Take a gender and IQ match of underpriviledged children and educate them similarly. Who would achieve what? Would any of the underpriviledged climb out of their poverty trap? Would any of the privileged slide into it? Which group of parents would end up inputing the most?
(I'm not suggesting the experiment could seriously be done)
What do you think?

6pack that is all covered in the book. What a hoax IQ tests are. IQ tests famously favour those who created them in the first place: white males

From my lover, Daniel Dorling, pp 73:

"The best evidence we have that genetic factors influence school results is that there is more chance of your star sign or month of birth influencing your mental abilities than there is of your genes doing so. IN contrast, it is the country and the century you are born into, how you are raised and how much is spent on your schooling which all actually matter.

Star signs matter slightly in that they indicate when in the year you were born and hence how physically developed you were when you first entered school. It does not matter whether you were born on a MOnday; it matters only a little whether you are a Capricorn; and 'the IQ gene' does not exist.

Sadly, it is the believe in things like the IQ gene or equivalent that results in teachers being asked around the rich world to identify children who may become especially 'gifted and talented'. We may well be born with varying 'idiosyncracies' , blue eyes or brown eyes, distinct chins or no chins, but these no more imply that the upper classes have superior genes than that Sunday's children are more likely to be born 'bonny and blithe, and good and gay.'

Researchers have found that different children can grow up to be differently able in ways other than through the fiction of inherent intelligence. Some children grow up to be adults who appear far more able to help others in a crisis, the most celebrated of these adults in recent European history being those very few who helped rescue and shelter Jewish people in occupied Europe. It is worth repeating that when the rescuers' backgrounds were looked into it was commonly found that their parents had set high standards for them as children, high standards as to how they would view others, and their parents did not treat them as if there were limits to their abilities, nor did they tell them that others were limited.... it is harder to cajole those who have been taught, while young, that others are equal and deserving of respect to behave in a way they find abhorrent. And it is just as hard to convince those brought up to think of themselves as superior that there is no natural unlevel playing field of inherent ability."

It's very depressing that people believe it is dangerous to aspire.

Not dangerous, just delusional to believe success and exam scores are the result of inherent, genetic ability rather than social advantages.

What is dangerous is convincing the populace that the only reason they are not millionaires is because they did not try hard enough, because they did not aspire the way they should have or could have.

When the truth is that society is elitist, and does everything it can to remain that way

Try faith schools for your experiment. They often have a good "value added" because of one huge difference: good, committed, positive parents input. Thing to deny the role of parents is ludicrous.

You said dangerous.

It is not dangerous to aspire. I think more people are limited by their own expectations of themselves then anything else. There is nothing very special about me but I've done "well" because I don't feel so hindered.

On the other hand you don't always breed nice and happy children if you do pressure them too much of course. That's the difficult point for parents. Some and I don't want to be racist here but some Chinese parents in my view are just plain nasty to their children. We can all beat or shout at a child to make it do 3 hours homework and music pracitce at night but you don't always get children who are happy and internally content that way. On the other hand if you're so laid back that they don't even think it matters if they do their homework then they probably won't do very well either. The middle ground is probably waht most of us seek. you can probably make most children geniuses at various things if you brow beat them enough but that also is not desirable.

I didn't say it was all iq. It's iq, working hard and parental influence.

Yes, to deny the role of parents is ludicrous. The background of the child and the parents are significant social advantages or disadvantages.

But what keeps children down and trapped is the two-tier education system, a classist society and elitism.

Denying these just makes it sound as though you believe that the American dream is not just the bullshit they feed to the proletariat to stop them from feeling discontent at the inequalitites of society and grabbiness of the elite tier. (23% of British funding goes to the 7% of private school children!)

Teach the proletariat its their fault they're in a cycle of poverty, that they cannot achieve anything, and voila , the elitist system is perpetuated. God help you if you've fallen for the delusions yourself, however. BUt more to the point, God help your children if they fail to perform the way they're supposed to.

I said thinking you are special, as in you are in your position in life because you are born more able than others, is dangerous. [see the Jews in Europe example]

The curriculum can male a huge difference when parental involvement is poor. For society, it had a duty to those children with low, no, parental support . Of you think its all down to style of education, why wouldn't you encourage state schools to copy what private schools do? You can't see past the money.it's like am obsession.

"high achieving children' are more loving or more committed, it's that they know how to work the system to their advantage."

That would suggest though that you could never go to university if your parents hadn't been which we all know is not true.
I do wonder though if aspirations are just lacking in some families full stop. I know a family, both teachers and we were talking about schools as mine goes to high school next year. They are currently in the primary catchment for one excellent school and one average, they chose the average one because they saw the excellent one as stuck up (the children there wear a shirt and tie and smart woolen jumpers as opposed to a polo shirt and sweater at the other), that was their reason for not choosing a school, go figure.
She has also told the teacher she can't do spellings homework with her eldest because she has younger children ??
They also said they wouldn't be tutoring for the 11+ or pushing their child in anyway.
Fine their methods may work, but if they don't who will they blame ?

I am talking here about the inequalities of society being perpetuated by the way society has been structured.
Tamagochi dolls and education style are by the by.
Educational achievement has nothing to do with copying private schools or not. It's about re-structuring society so that the opportunities are there for all children, not just those who are privileged enough to set aside money for private school.

As I have said, I can't abide this notion that somehow it's the poor who have created the class system that has trapped them. It is not. Those who wish to perpetuate elitism are to blame for the status quo.