Education privilege
Feb. 22nd, 2026 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI want to talk about the education privilege meme that's been doing the rounds. On the one hand I love old-school memes that encourage lots of cool people on my d-roll to talk about their experiences growing up. But at the same time, I'm kind of frowning at this particular iteration.
First up, I hesitated to fill out this meme because I hardly need a checklist to tell me I have so much "educational privilege" I'm basically a millionaire. It seems rather like showing off to write a long post about how I attended academically competitive fee-paying schools from 5 to 18, and have a First from an internationally famous university, and a PhD and I'm halfway through training to be a rabbi (another five year post-graduate academic and professional qualification). Both my parents and two of my four grandparents and two of my three siblings (3/4 if you count my foster brother) have completed professional and academic post-graduate qualifications. And I'm neurotypical and physically and mentally abled and Jewish and basically everybody in my entire life has actively supported me getting as much education as possible. The only reason this meme is anything other than disgustingly rude is that this is the social media site built around long-form writing; most of us are over-educated. Even with that I've seen some posts from people who with mixed feelings about everybody else posting about all the advantages that they didn't benefit from. In short it couldn't be more obvious that I have all the educational privilege in the world, and I would have to be very blinkered indeed to have somehow failed to notice that these advantages aren't universal.
Second, wait up, why are we rehashing the privilege knapsack from 1988? (Take a seat if you need to, but that was in fact nearly 40 years ago.) One thing about having a massive amount of education is that I have the skills to think critically and look for original sources! Rather than just smugly answer all the questions, let me respond to this like an educated person. McIntosh's work was groundbreaking at the time, and she came up with a memorable way of communicating to white women that although we experience sexism, we also have racial privilege. But is it still useful to be working with tools developed in that context? I was thinking that since the Privilege Knapsack we have discovered intersectionality, but when I looked it up I found that in fact Crenshaw was an exact contemporary of McIntosh and coined the term in 1989. This only adds to my suspicion that there's some agenda behind getting everybody to pretend we're in a women's studies intro course in the 1980s.
Third, and probably least important: why is this an education privilege meme and not purely a social class meme? This may be one of those transatlantic divides, come to think of it. Like Americans famously don't like talking about class, whereas English people are obsessed with it. To me, 'where did you you go to school?' is pretty much a socially acceptable way of asking, what class are you? OK, there exist rich parents who are abusive or neglectful or for other reasons actively obstruct their children's access to education. But basically most of the meme seems to be, did you have adequate resources and live in a neighbourhood with adequate resources? And did your family's social circle include people from the professional world? Do Americans really believe these things are unconnected to class background?
The other thought is bullying. I've seen many many posts where people ticked almost every item on the list except feeling physically and emotionally safe at school, because pretty much all of us with our heaps of education privilege were bullied, possibly by people with less education privilege (if that's actually a thing). I have mixed feelings about that too; I was bullied at school, but not in the way that the typical American high school drama trope goes. I was bullied mainly when I was under 10, not as a teenager. And it was mainly instigated by teachers and mainly about antisemitism, not by other kids who were angry with me for being academically successful. Even though I was very very much a nerd, I never experienced the jocks v nerds thing, or popular v outcast thing. That's partly a consequence of education privilege; I attended schools where getting high marks across the board was admired, not despised. I certainly wasn't popular but the girls who cared about such things ignored me rather than tormenting me.
I say girls – I think being in a single sex environment actually helped. People often claim that girls' "relational aggression" is just as bad as boys' physical violence, and I don't deny that some people are badly traumatized by bullying instigated by girls, but my experience is that it's a lot easier to ignore not being invited to certain parties than being beaten up. And there was homophobia as you'd expect in 1990s England, but people didn't clock me as not straight and I had it much easier than my (actually straight but somewhat effeminate) brother in a boys' school. What I didn't experience was sexual assault or any other forms of gender based aggression. And I didn't have any problem with people assuming that girls can't succeed academically or "shouldn't" do maths and science. That is an aspect of education privilege also not really captured by the meme. In late 20th century England, "good" schools (mostly fee paying but some state funded) were almost all single sex. On the one hand, I am politically against gratuitous segregation, and I know that the data showing that girls do better in girls-only educational settings is heavily confounded by the fact that well resourced schools were single sex when the data was collected. But in my case I think having a 10 year break when I didn't have to deal with teenage boys or significant adult sexism was an aspect of my education privilege.
Anyway, hopefully this is an adequate substitute for the meme and you don't need me to tell you in detail how absurdly precocious I was in reading and maths.
First up, I hesitated to fill out this meme because I hardly need a checklist to tell me I have so much "educational privilege" I'm basically a millionaire. It seems rather like showing off to write a long post about how I attended academically competitive fee-paying schools from 5 to 18, and have a First from an internationally famous university, and a PhD and I'm halfway through training to be a rabbi (another five year post-graduate academic and professional qualification). Both my parents and two of my four grandparents and two of my three siblings (3/4 if you count my foster brother) have completed professional and academic post-graduate qualifications. And I'm neurotypical and physically and mentally abled and Jewish and basically everybody in my entire life has actively supported me getting as much education as possible. The only reason this meme is anything other than disgustingly rude is that this is the social media site built around long-form writing; most of us are over-educated. Even with that I've seen some posts from people who with mixed feelings about everybody else posting about all the advantages that they didn't benefit from. In short it couldn't be more obvious that I have all the educational privilege in the world, and I would have to be very blinkered indeed to have somehow failed to notice that these advantages aren't universal.
Second, wait up, why are we rehashing the privilege knapsack from 1988? (Take a seat if you need to, but that was in fact nearly 40 years ago.) One thing about having a massive amount of education is that I have the skills to think critically and look for original sources! Rather than just smugly answer all the questions, let me respond to this like an educated person. McIntosh's work was groundbreaking at the time, and she came up with a memorable way of communicating to white women that although we experience sexism, we also have racial privilege. But is it still useful to be working with tools developed in that context? I was thinking that since the Privilege Knapsack we have discovered intersectionality, but when I looked it up I found that in fact Crenshaw was an exact contemporary of McIntosh and coined the term in 1989. This only adds to my suspicion that there's some agenda behind getting everybody to pretend we're in a women's studies intro course in the 1980s.
Third, and probably least important: why is this an education privilege meme and not purely a social class meme? This may be one of those transatlantic divides, come to think of it. Like Americans famously don't like talking about class, whereas English people are obsessed with it. To me, 'where did you you go to school?' is pretty much a socially acceptable way of asking, what class are you? OK, there exist rich parents who are abusive or neglectful or for other reasons actively obstruct their children's access to education. But basically most of the meme seems to be, did you have adequate resources and live in a neighbourhood with adequate resources? And did your family's social circle include people from the professional world? Do Americans really believe these things are unconnected to class background?
The other thought is bullying. I've seen many many posts where people ticked almost every item on the list except feeling physically and emotionally safe at school, because pretty much all of us with our heaps of education privilege were bullied, possibly by people with less education privilege (if that's actually a thing). I have mixed feelings about that too; I was bullied at school, but not in the way that the typical American high school drama trope goes. I was bullied mainly when I was under 10, not as a teenager. And it was mainly instigated by teachers and mainly about antisemitism, not by other kids who were angry with me for being academically successful. Even though I was very very much a nerd, I never experienced the jocks v nerds thing, or popular v outcast thing. That's partly a consequence of education privilege; I attended schools where getting high marks across the board was admired, not despised. I certainly wasn't popular but the girls who cared about such things ignored me rather than tormenting me.
I say girls – I think being in a single sex environment actually helped. People often claim that girls' "relational aggression" is just as bad as boys' physical violence, and I don't deny that some people are badly traumatized by bullying instigated by girls, but my experience is that it's a lot easier to ignore not being invited to certain parties than being beaten up. And there was homophobia as you'd expect in 1990s England, but people didn't clock me as not straight and I had it much easier than my (actually straight but somewhat effeminate) brother in a boys' school. What I didn't experience was sexual assault or any other forms of gender based aggression. And I didn't have any problem with people assuming that girls can't succeed academically or "shouldn't" do maths and science. That is an aspect of education privilege also not really captured by the meme. In late 20th century England, "good" schools (mostly fee paying but some state funded) were almost all single sex. On the one hand, I am politically against gratuitous segregation, and I know that the data showing that girls do better in girls-only educational settings is heavily confounded by the fact that well resourced schools were single sex when the data was collected. But in my case I think having a 10 year break when I didn't have to deal with teenage boys or significant adult sexism was an aspect of my education privilege.
Anyway, hopefully this is an adequate substitute for the meme and you don't need me to tell you in detail how absurdly precocious I was in reading and maths.
