- Tue Aug 02, 2022 4:14 pm
#30552
It very much depends on three factors:
1 - the ability (intelligence) of the child.
2 - the social class of the parents
3 - the familial motivation
Birblesing of course selects for all three.
This is something I wrote in reply to a post of Steve Rose's back in 2008 which, by coincidence I found earlier today.
This will be a long post, sorry. Also - not much in the way of references.
I've always been interested in the effects of social class on educational attainment, partly because as a working-class lad I was chewed up by the system, and it took a lot of grief to get the education I felt I deserved. Whether or not that was a good idea is another thing...
By social class it’s best to use the Registrar General's categories:
1 Higher managerial and professional occupations
1.1 Employers and managers in larger organisations (e.g. company directors, senior company managers, senior civil servants, senior officers in police and armed forces.)
1.2 Higher professionals (e.g. doctors, lawyers, clergy, teachers and social workers.)
2. Lower Managerial and professional occupations (e.g. nurses and midwives, journalists, actors, musicians, prison officers, lower ranks of police and armed forces.)
3. Intermediate occupations (e.g. clerks, secretaries, driving instructors, telephone fitters.)
4. Small Employers and own account workers (e.g. publicans, farmers, taxi drivers, window cleaners, painters and decorators.)
5. Lower supervisory, craft and related occupations (e.g. printers, plumbers, television engineers, train drivers, butchers.)
6. Semi-routine occupations (e.g. shop assistants, hairdressers, bus drivers, cooks.)
7. Routine occupations (e.g. couriers, labourers, waiters and refuse collectors.)
8. Plus an eighth category to cover those who have never had paid work and the long term unemployed.
I think we would all agree that one effective way of 'improving' our children's chances in later life is through education - and really that means an academic, rather than technical, series of courses which go further than those normally taught in schools. (The academic courses open and develop new ways of thinking, higher order thinking skills or HOTS which are the necessary preparation for category 1-4 employment.)
Yet the takeup of higher education courses by people in social categories 5-8 is lower than in 1-4.
There could be two reasons for that. Some academics have suggested that the children of the working classes are inherently less intelligent than those of the middle classes. Whilst it is true that there is a very significant genetic element to intelligence (a tricky term in itself) I have never seen any evidence that there are not large numbers of working-class kids who are above-average intelligence. So that can be left to one side in practical terms, especially as in a decent system of equal opportunity it doesn't matter, as we are not talking about numerical parity, but equal chances.
The second reason, which I think Steve mentioned, is low aspiration. This is a real problem (see Sutton Trust).
Some parents with a poor or weak experience of education do not value it, and do not promote it with their children. They simply see it as a chore which has to be gone through, with avoidance if possible. A fair number of these parents actually collude with their children truanting or avoiding work whenever possible. The cases you see of mothers being prosecuted for their child’s non-attendance are usually in that category. These kids are effectively hobbled, and will find it very hard to move upwards in social and economic terms. They may well end up in Category 8 and stay there.
Other parents want their kids to do well, and see education as a route for that, but have no knowledge of the ‘system’, unlike the middle-class parents who have been through the system themselves. Many ethnic minority families fall into this category, and it is (imo) one of the reasons why the performance of black boys falls off in secondary schools (though there are others).
The evidence for this is in the returns for university entrance (which I can’t find, but had access to when I was working for Guvment). These set out entrance figures for different universities and courses by the social category of families.
Not surprisingly, the ‘best’ courses are law and medicine, offering the greatest status and reward. These, especially at Russell Group top universities, are taken up overwhelmingly by kids for Category 1. In fact, kids whose parents are lawyers and doctors. The ‘worst’ courses (media studies at ‘new’ universities) are dominated by kids from categories 4-8. (One of the things that really annoys me is the way that the Statlers and Waldorfs of this world, getting their info from the Wail, decry these degrees – in fact they are they way that working class kids start the process of upward mobility, which is presumably why they hate it so much).
What I have tried to do – with a lot of others – is to find those intelligent and able kids in the working classes (5-8) whose families are higher education virgins and to enable them and motivate them to take up the opportunities they have. And don’t be cynical about government in this, there has been a pile of money allocated to this over the last 10 years, with some effect*. The main non-government organisation working on this is the Sutton Trust, who have done a huge amount to overcome underachievement.
But – I always remember something I heard many years ago from a very influential professor at Durham – the greatest factor in individual success is intelligence. I might add creativity to that. Those are not characteristics which are dependant on social class, but their development may be.
* This was written in 2008 after 10 years of Labour investment in education. This is not true of the last 10 years. The first thing Gove did in 2010 was to close down the Gifted and Talented Education Unit.
What would I know - I'm just a pathetic snowflake and feudal lord living in a foetid shithole...
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