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.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 10:30 pm (UTC)I did not know that there was so much regional difference in things like libraries and schools. For me in England, my default assumption is that a "nice" area (ie one where most people are middle class) is almost synonymous with an area where there are high-performing schools and good libraries. It's a bit chicken and egg; people who can afford to do so buy homes near good schools and libraries, but also areas where most of the population are comfortably off are more able to fund good schools and libraries. I would not have predicted that people who can afford to live in the Bay Area would be limited in access to public libraries.
As Wildeabandon says, over here, richest family in a small town / own a car dealership is affluent working class, or maaaybe lower middle depending on exact circumstances. It's certainly not upper class; it's "trade" and upper class people have wealth and land and investments, not businesses. And part of the reason is that class is tied up with educational opportunity; if you have plenty of money but live in a place that doesn't have a desirable local school, you're excluded from a big part of the class hierarchy.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 11:42 pm (UTC)I live in a different rural area now but the dynamics are exactly the same 30 years later. One of the issues with keeping professionals in rural areas is that once their kids hit secondary school age, the educational system is very unlikely to give them the marks they need to get into their parents' profession, so they tend to return to the city.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-23 02:55 am (UTC)My current neighborhood is a great example of the other pattern this can take, which is definitely not a class privilege one. If you're living in my neighborhood in a one- or two-bedroom apartment with several siblings and several family adults, everybody crammed together, you definitely don't have economic privilege. You're going to public school with kids who do. (In my current neighborhood basically only the Roman Catholics who want their kids going to a religious school are privately schooling their kids.) But...will you be able to take advantage of the fully funded arts and music programs, or will you have to hurry home after school to look after your younger siblings, work an after-school job, etc.? There's an economic component to that, but it ALSO means that you will not pick up all the class stuff you might learn from being in that "extra" setting with other kids. If there is tutoring at the school, will you be able to use it, or again, will you have other obligations on your time? Will someone be able to walk you through some of things like "how to interview at a college," will you even know that you can ask for that?
I think obviously, this is not a question with only one answer. But even some of my friends who were able to do math club (it was before school, 0715, so there was almost no way it would be competing with an after-school job) or high school band (an actual class period! some few instruments available to borrow from the school!) still suffered comparatively in class ways within those activities. I have memories of kids being offered less help, fewer resources, because teachers were reading them as apathetic and defiant of social norms when in fact they were dressed shabbily because they were poor, had less clear diction because that was how the people in their world talked, did not know some of the "niceties" that they "should" do to signal that they were bright kids who wanted opportunities--and having someone like me with clothes and voice and manners that signaled "respectable intelligentsia/artist class" as contrast with them meant that they were less likely to be pulled out as diamonds in the rough because there were diamonds in gold settings to be compared with. So I think the benefits of being that kid in a "rich school" vs. a "poor school" were highly varied in class terms.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-23 10:44 am (UTC)My knowledge of this is all secondhand due to homeschooling through high school. I grew up in a suburb which became a separate school district from its neighboring city in the 1960s, resulting in two public high schools only a mile apart but socioeconomically distinct from each other (yes this is a white flight thing). The suburban high school was stereotyped as "privileged rich kids" while the urban high school was stereotyped as "troubled/dysfunctional". The suburban high school, while having a reputation as a "good school" and benefiting from a highly educated group of parents, prioritized spending on athletics. Meanwhile the urban high school was known for having the only International Baccalaureate program in the area and an excellent drama program, so that a certain type of student could still get an excellent education, and it was common for students in the urban district whose parents cared about education to attend K-8 private school and then go to the public high school. I had friends from both school districts who went on to elite liberal arts colleges; it wasn't as obvious as it seemed which high school was "better".
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-23 04:12 am (UTC)I have for some time though about writing about "geographical class" as a fourth sort of class. The kid who grows up in a one-parent working-class family making $40k/yr in Chelsea, MA and the kid who grows up in a one-parent working-class family making $40/yr in Cambridge, MA wind up having very different childhoods and experiences of class, both economic and social.
I did not know that there was so much regional difference in things like libraries and schools.
Vastly so. It's a product of the US's radical idea of home rule. Different regions have different ideas as to what constitutes "good" (or "good enough"). If you ask around Massachusetts, you will hear people bellyaching that our healthcare resources and educational system are middling at best. They're not wrong, by MA standards. It's also true they are literally the best in the country – it's just our standards are that much higher.
So a "nice" area in one state might not be anywhere as advantaged as a "nice" area in another. I've heard from people who went to what they thought of as "good schools" in their home state then moved to MA and found they needed remedial instruction.
over here, richest family in a small town / own a car dealership is affluent working class, or maaaybe lower middle depending on exact circumstances. It's certainly not upper class; it's "trade" and upper class people have wealth and land and investments, not businesses.
Oh, here too. That what I was writing about in the post of mine you linked.