Tessa K wrote: ↑Mon Dec 02, 2019 4:54 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Mon Dec 02, 2019 3:41 pm
bolo wrote: ↑Sun Dec 01, 2019 3:59 pm
And a working class person's dependent children and nonworking spouse are not working class?
Obviously, dependents' class interests are the same as the person(s) on whom they depend. It's amazing what people can misunderstand when they really put their mind to it.
If you're a boomer born at the most recent end of that generation there's a good chance you went to college fully funded and got a better job than your parents.
I’m going to nitpick and say that timeline doesn’t pan out. By the usual definition, I miss being a boomer by a matter of months. I did go to college without paying fees, but I did so alongside a tiny, tiny number of my peers. Less than 10% of school leavers went to University and got a degree in my day (mid 80s) - the vast majority of post-18 qualifications would have been gained through FE colleges and would not have been degree level,and the vast majority of school leavers would not have those qualifications at all. Bear in mind that for most of the previous decade, there was a significant effort to reduce the number of people who couldn’t read, and that while that’s vastly improved, poor literacy is still a problem in the UK for an unacceptably large number Of adults (
https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-a ... -literacy/
HE provision massively expanded under the Major govt, 1989-1990 ish, but widening participation did not - the primary beneficiaries were middle class women.
So I think the number of people of whom we can say “got a free education and a better job than your parents” is much smaller than you’d think, because by the time that education became genuinely accessible, a) fees were payable, and b) the job market had changed such that a level of education is pretty much essential for bog standard white collar work, because the technical landscape those jobs operate in has increased in complexity. (That’s my theory anyway) either way, boomers had access to free education yes, but a vanishingly small number of working class boomers will have been able to make use of it.
So you may have retained a working class sensibility but you wouldn't be WC any more. Your political interests may well have been changed from your parents' by contact with a wider range of people and ideas too.
This definitely happens, though. But I think this also applies to a small group - people moving to professions like law and medicine , or moving into academia. The latter is especially vulnerable to this because so much of academia irritatingly presents itself still, as entry into a sect rather than paid employment, but that’s a whole other conversation. But since this really only applies to people who do PhDs, that tells you that this too, applies to a teeny number of people.
Edit to add some important negatives