How the other half lives, what and when you learned

[tomorrowalready]

Reflecting from another thread made me realise it was not until my 20s I found out some people expected to have a private bathroom. I went to university then and shared with another mature student who had been married, divorced and said she found having to share a bathroom with unrelated people unpleasant. I had always taken it for granted as had live in jobs and rented bedsits before. She was a lovely person and also the first person I knew who had a glass of wine every evening and she introduced me to many new things - cooking with garlic, sherry, owning and using a car for shopping for example.

So what did you take for granted that surprised other people you met?

What’s the way out of poverty for bright kids now?

A good comprehensive school.

Posted too early. A good comprehensive school in an area where there are no state grammar schools to cream off the brightest children.

@RampantIvy

What’s the way out of poverty for bright kids now?

A good comprehensive school.

It clearly isn’t. Or if it is, there are so few of them that they might as well not exist at all.

@RampantIvy

Posted too early. A good comprehensive school in an area where there are no state grammar schools to cream off the brightest children.

Private schools will simply spring up to do the same job and cream off the brightest. Same outcome but reserved to the rich.

The quiet place to study and plenty of encouragement are more than many kids from really deprived backgrounds would have had so even though your dd is clearly very bright and although she wasn't tutored, she still had considerable advantages. I would guess that she also grew up in a house full of books and with parents who talked to her a lot, both of which would also have given her a headstart in her education.

Tried to quote BuggerOffAndGoodDayToYou but the quote disappeared and didn't attach to my post.

@petridishmystery - I’m in Guernsey too!

Private schools will simply spring up to do the same job and cream off the brightest. Same outcome but reserved to the rich.

We are fortunate where we live that the local comprehensive school is a good one. Yes, some children went to private school in the next city, but most children in the area went to DD's school, with excellent outcomes. It simply wasn't necessary to go private for DD's education.

It sounds like this school is one of the exceptions.

I remember going to uni and the girls I hung out with had rich parents. They would regularly run up credit cards shopping and their parents would pay them off, meanwhile I got £25 a week from mine and worked during term time and all through the holidays.

Going out for dinner was not “a thing” when I was growing up. We couldn’t afford it I don’t think. Again, when I went to Uni, the girls I hung out with used to go out for dinner all the time. I regularly felt out of my depth and didn’t know what to do.

I’d never been to London and dated a boy whose parents lived there. I remember going to his parents house in West London and thinking it wasn’t all that as it had a really small garden. Of course, I didn’t realise that a 4 bed terraced house in this part of London meant you were quite wealthy (his dad drove a Rolls). I also remember them taking us out for Chinese and me not having a clue what to order as we’d never had Chinese before - making the duck pancakes blew my mind.

We also went to visit his friend (who was also my friend at uni) at his parents apartment in Maida Vale - I remember looking up at the big (very nice) block and thinking they can’t be that wealthy as they live in a flat. Wrong, the friend also played a pivotal part in the wedding of a Royal.

I was so clueless as a child!

I remember going to play at a friend's house (I was probably about eight) and noticing that there was a weird kind of sweetish smell. After a while I found there was a large patch/lump of mould or fungus or something on her bedroom carpet. I was really concerned by this and thought she/her mum must not have noticed. So I told her about it. She was really embarrassed and said no, it's not mould, there's nothing there. I didn't understand that she was embarrassed and was quite insistent that she should tell her mum. It didn't occur to me that some grown ups didn't have the means to fix something like that and would just leave it because the alternative would have been no carpet in the room at all.

This girl was later in the local papers because she had a baby at 15 and there were something like five or six generations of her family alive at the same time.

We weren't well off, things were quite tight for us day to day, but I had grandparents who would cover anything like that that they would have considered an emergency.

I didn't really notice that people were rich until I was an adult. The thing that shocked me was things like my ex would go to Tesco and buy loads of 2L bottles of pop - those were for once a year, like Christmas/birthdays only in my house! Or we'd go on a day out and just buy drinks/snacks when we felt like it wandering around instead of bringing a bottle of water. Or the first time I went with him to McDonald's and he bought a meal with another burger on the side. That absolutely blew my mind. He wasn't rich though, just had a different attitude to money.

I think I was late 20s when I realised how much money some people really have to live on and understood the difference. I split up with that ex when I was about 22 and my mum was helping me navigate the council system for housing benefit etc. I was struggling to find a landlord who would take DS and I on. One estate agent suggested we find a guarantor who had a salary of at least 3x the rent (rent was about £600 at the time, probably 10 years ago) so not a huge amount of money, but I remember my mum going white and saying "What?! We don't know anyone who earns that sort of money!" as though it was millions. I kind of just assumed she was right.

@RampantIvy

What’s the way out of poverty for bright kids now?

A good comprehensive school.

In a good area which has spaces for those out of area who cannot afford house prices in their normal catchment area...

@Arsebucket - that is truly awful. Talent is talent no matter what medium or what paper. Some of my favourite pieces are pen on paper. Picasso did his beautiful sketches on odd bits of paper and even dinner plates.

I went to art school and whilst I was talented supplies are far too expensive. Having little money is the mother of invention but it gets very wearing when it's all the time. I also had no hope of going any further.

I knew at high school we had less than most people because my DM refused to work but spent all the time on herself and her affair partners. Money had to directly benefit her. We rarely had a vacation, did not have central heating, did not have a reliable car when these things were common place.

At art school the gap was in the main wider. Others were getting money from their DPs. Even during a chat with my DM and a friend and I told her how much I struggled it was my friend who helped me with much cheaper accommodation. My DM just shrugged.

I worked as well and struggled through but I was so vulnerable and it affected my mental health. I've never allowed my DS to feel that.

Even if your family is supportive and happy there comes a point when money does matter. Money causes so much stress and if you haven't got any you cannot help even in dire circumstances.

I've worked very hard for a stable present and future. However, so did my DF and if he hadn't divorced my DM he would have had a miserable retirement. Others work very hard in valuable jobs and struggle and it is an outrage.

@RampantIvy

Posted too early. A good comprehensive school in an area where there are no state grammar schools to cream off the brightest children.

😂😂😂😂😂 What’s the weather like in utopia?

[quote EmmaGrundyForPM]**@Blossomtoes* and @RampantIvy*

A study by Halsey & Gardner in the 1950s found that grammar schools were NOT a way out of poverty for the majority of bright but poor children. Even then, grammar schools were predominantly middle class. It's true that there wasn't the tutoring that there is now, but study after study has shown that, by the age of 7 or 8, middle class children are out performing brighter working class children because of the opportunities they are afforded.

You just have to look back at this thread, where people are talking about the poverty they experienced as children. Yes, a few very bright but poor children would have made it to grammar school but the vast majority didn't. For those who did, of course their life chances were improved, but the myth that grammar schools in the 50s and 60s promoted social mobility us exactly that - a myth.[/quote]
No one has ever said it would be for the majority of bright wc children just that it existed as a pathway and that pathway has been closed off and not replaced.

What about all the working class kids who passed the 11 plus but couldn't go because their parents couldn't afford the uniform and all the accoutrements? That was a big thing.

And the kids who didn't pass who were packed off to the secondary modern with a sense of failure that often stayed with them for life?

@Antiqueanniesmagiclanternshow

What about all the working class kids who passed the 11 plus but couldn't go because their parents couldn't afford the uniform and all the accoutrements? That was a big thing.

And the kids who didn't pass who were packed off to the secondary modern with a sense of failure that often stayed with them for life?

The secondary modern had a uniform too. There was a second hand uniform shop at the grammar school I went to and parents could access it immediately if their kid got a grammar school place. One of my contemporaries was one of five kids living in a council house, they all took up their places. It was an incredibly bright family.

The sense of failure is bollocks. Expectations were pretty well managed in primary schools, it didn’t come as much of a shock to those who didn’t pass. There was an interview process for a borderline mark in the exam.

[quote korawick12345]@miltonj that makes no sense, why would you need to have a scholarship at a grammar school, they didn’t have fees[/quote]
to cover uniform, travel costs, school trips?

@godmum56 those things exist at all schools.

My comprehensive school was used in a study with a neighbouring grammar school in a different nearby local education authority. Those at the comprehensive that would have passed the 11+ did just as well as those at the grammar school. However, the middle-and lower-attaining pupils did far better at the comprehensive than their equivalents at the secondary modern.

I can't comment on the big numbers about grammar schools. the grammar school I went to (now fairly well known) was started to educate poor children and, when I went there via the 11 plus, it still did. Social class was massively varied, we (sibs and I) were among the poorest but not the poorest. There was a second hand uniform shop, various bursaries and funding opportunities for things like school trips, and right the way through school we got what was called a half pass that kept the travel cost to an under 14 fare on all travel. There were also grants and bursaries avaialble for further education (colleges and universities). For us it was the leg up without which we wouldn't have made it into professional training because the alternatives for us were really bad sec mods. I honestly don't think that its as easy as saying "grammars were bad". I would say "system was bad" My best mates kids when to a really good local comprehensive some 40 years after I was at school and both have done very well but i suspect that the comprehensives who get good results stream within the schools so effectively what you have are grammar schools embedded (hidden if you will) inside the comprehensive system.

@daisypond

My comprehensive school was used in a study with a neighbouring grammar school in a different nearby local education authority. Those at the comprehensive that would have passed the 11+ did just as well as those at the grammar school. However, the middle-and lower-attaining pupils did far better at the comprehensive than their equivalents at the secondary modern.

But that would have been post universal provision of grammar schools/ secondary moderns which has been acknowledged on this thread several times as being a totally different situation.

[quote korawick12345]@godmum56 those things exist at all schools.[/quote]
yes maybe they do now, I don't know...... but we are talking about quite a few years ago.

People have cleaners. I thought only the Queen and really really fancy people had cleaners. I only found that out when I had kids and went to my new mum friends house and she complainded about the cleaner! I was .

@Monkeymilkshake

People have cleaners. I thought only the Queen and really really fancy people had cleaners. I only found that out when I had kids and went to my new mum friends house and she complainded about the cleaner! I was .

I only knew how many people have cleaners from reading MN 😅

The sense of failure is bollocks

It isn't. Loads of 11 year olds were written off under the old 11+ system.