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 02:33 pm (UTC)As to bullying, it does, I believe, depend on location and the surrounding culture. I never saw any bullying when I went to school, and there was one case of bullying in my daughter's class, which was pretty much stopped by the joint actions of parents. So, by my experience, I still believe that bullying is what parents allow to happen.
But the rest is impressive. And I've observed two flavors of racism, in California, and in South Carolina. It's much worse in California. In South Carolina it's almost invisible (but still exists).
Sexism... I'd talk about sexism, but then I'll be called a racist.
The view of class from the bottom up...
Date: 2026-02-22 02:49 pm (UTC)I think part of the reason people in the US don't talk about class is because the lines are not defined and there's this expectation that we can move classes due to the nature of our system..... our idea of our system haha. This meme points out though that getting a privileged/or not education can facilitate what class you enter as an adult. Still, both my parents came from higher classes than the one I grew up in. My dad's side was pretty middle class. Grandpa was a truck driver, but he made good money and could buy a house in a nice neighborhood. My mom's father was a college professor at one of the biggest colleges in Texas... but he got his education through being enlisted during WWII and getting on the G.I. bill which paid for his education. His parents were entrepreneurs and tried various occupations from shop owners to farmers. Back then you really could "pull up your bootstraps" and achieve a level of wealth way beyond what you came from. I feel like the G.I. bill had a lot to do with that though. The men (white men only) that came back from WWII were able to go to college on the government dime and that helped increase the middle class by a huge margin, but it didn't hold. The hippie movement could not have existed without a mass of young people that grew up in privilege and rejecting it. My parent fell into that category for sure. My dad read On The Road like it was a bible. He wanted to work with his hands rather than work as a scientist even though that's what he went to college to do. My mom just got sick and three kids so she wasn't able to pursue a higher career.
Still I didn't realize until I was an adult that one of the reasons I was ostracized as a kid was because I was poor. On the surface it was because I was neglected and had dirty clothes and hair and a "messy house". I don't think the other kids realized it either. I have this memory of a middle-class guy in my high school scrutinizing me one day. Just looking at me with a ponderous look and then asking me if I was one of those people that lived in a dirty house. He didn't get it, and I didn't get it. I pondered on my house and the houses of my peers and thought about the ones that were "dirty" and the ones that were not, and sheepishly answered, "Yes?" I mean my house wasn't dirty, but it was small and all the things were of low quality. There wasn't any interior decorating going on. It was in fact only part of a house that we rented. I often wonder if I understood things better and answered that guy with, "Yeah, I'm poor." how he would have reacted.
Despite all that, there is an implied shame put upon people who don't move up the classes here. At most of my jobs before the one I have now, customers would often ask me, "Are you the owner?" and I'd have to tell them that I was just a worker. As I got older there was this expectation that someone my age should have a better job. Like I should have tried harder to use our system to my advantage instead of remaining in my class. Moreso because I live in a very educated city.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 03:32 pm (UTC)(I haven't done the memem, but my educational privilege mostly comes from having two parents with Ph.D.s, one of them a stay-at-home mom who was willing to try homeschooling when my well-funded public elementary school wasn't working for me educationally or socially, and who put in the initiative to find and sometimes create external opportunities for me/my sister that would help us thrive.)
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 03:59 pm (UTC)But also different regions of the US fund things differently. The public and school libraries in the San Francisco Bay Area are an absolute shame, by my Minnesotan standards, they're tiny and shabby and poorly stocked--and, unsurprisingly, they can't afford outreach programs to let people know what resources the libraries have. And that's California, that's better than most of Nebraska for example. Meanwhile here in Minnesota we have libraries that lend not only books but tools, museum passes, etc.--and we have massive outreach programs to let our neighbors know that they're there and free to use even if they didn't come from "a library family."
You're still going to see a lot of clumping in answers, and I'm not surprised you have, but there are also places of surprising divergence that can make a lot of difference to people.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 04:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 05:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 05:38 pm (UTC)I have many, many relatives in places like this, for whom I am the Fancy Rich City Cousin (class mobility within families is A WHOLE OTHER TOPIC), and they can sort of see that I am not the same as the car dealership owner, but there's absolutely no sense of what they're seeing, how they can articulate it, whether it's actually a class or cultural difference or just a personality difference. Or regional! It gets very tangled.
But even in the places where the class distinctions have more fine gradations, it's just plain different from the US to the UK.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 06:04 pm (UTC)But they were also quite poor when I was a young child - not quite 'having to choose between heating and eating' poor, but clothes and furniture were second-hand, restaurant meals were a couple-of-times-a-year treat, annual summer holidays were a week in a self-catering cottage, that sort of thing - fee paying schools certainly weren't an option.
Fortunately I didn't directly encounter anyone like Toby Young when I arrived in Cambridge as a grammar school boy, but the fact that my Yorkshire accent is now barely detectable is not entirely unrelated to being concerned that I might.
And for me the intersectionality with neurotype was pretty significant. In theory I had a lot of educational privilege, but I was also locked in battle with my own brain in ways that I didn't understand that made it very difficult for me to take advantage of it to the full, to an extent that I'm only really beginning to understand now that I've come back to studying with diagnoses and drugs.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 06:42 pm (UTC)My parents came from families that didn't really value education - my father never got past Grade 9 and my mom was one of 3 kids in her age group that pushed through to finish Grade 12. She wanted to go to university - but when she moved from Saskatchewan to Alberta and tried to apply, she was told that her Grade 12 diploma from Saskatchewan wasn't good enough to get into university in Alberta - and it was too demoralizing to have to go *back* to high school at that point.
My mom was ADAMANT that all her kids were going to have the opportunity to go to university - saying that she would get a side job scrubbing floors if she had to, to make sure we could afford it. She always felt "less than" people who had university degrees - and when I (as the eldest kid) went to university, I was the first person in on my mom's side of the family to ever do so - and she had 5 siblings, who each had 2 kids, most of whom were older than me.
There were 4 kids in our family - and we all had very different experiences in school - so I found this meme interesting to think about how it applied to myself and my brothers - with the same mom (my dad did not involve himself in our education) having to navigate her way through supporting each kid differently to make sure we all succeeded to the best of each of our abilities.
That being said, even with all the desire in the world to support us - some of these questions made me realize that what would be considered "support" - we didn't get, due to money and time constraints - and probably also due to my mom not being educated and not really knowing "what to do" if that makes sense.
I find it interesting to read people's answers - acknowledging that it is a bit of a self-selecting group of people who are on DW/LJ and who are answering the questions :D
Thinky thoughts, indeed!
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 07:27 pm (UTC)Racism and sexism: this is why I referenced Crenshaw, if you try to analyse everything separately you often don't get sensible info. I experienced little direct sexism as a teenager because I was in an all-girls environment, though it didn't completely shield me from more general social attitudes towards girls and women. I didn't experience racism because I'm white; however the highly privileged school I went to really over-represented white people, both students and teachers. I don't recall anyone being deliberately racist but the very tiny numbers of visible ethnic minority kids had a very different experience from mine. Nowadays the most sought-after and usually most expensive schools have a lot of international students who are Asian-from-Asia as well as British kids from Asian backgrounds. But in the 80s and 90s "good" schools tended to skew white.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 07:59 pm (UTC)Re: The view of class from the bottom up...
Date: 2026-02-22 08:05 pm (UTC)But I still hate that neighbor boy that was calling me "a boy from a poor family". I'm sure now he hates me too, having done time in prison, in Moscow, being a corrupt bureaucrat... I find it funny.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 08:41 pm (UTC)On the other hand, the branch nearest to me is semi-permanently settled in a temporary building, and City of Oakland pulled the budget half-way through the planning process to renovate a neighboring unused childcare center into a new library. So maybe things haven't improved that much.
Re: The view of class from the bottom up...
Date: 2026-02-22 10:01 pm (UTC)I'm really interested in the idea that American talk about class is supposed to be about class mobility; I think my experience in the UK is that it's almost the other way round. People feel like like the class origins of their grandparents are highly relevant to their identity, even if they themselves have experienced upward mobility. I guess the part that's taboo to talk about is that social mobility means you can move down as well as up.
Part of what is happening, both sides of the Atlantic, is that there was a kind of anomalous generation post WW2. The creation of the welfare state, maybe more developed in Europe but it exists in the US too, the GI bill is a good example. The massive post-war industrial expansion meaning that there were plenty of jobs and opportunities to have a decent life even if you came from humble origins, the expansion of higher education. The generation above mine see that as normal, they take it as axiomatic that if you "work hard" and "do well in school" you can live comfortably. The generation below mine think this is a bullshit fairy tale. And I'm somewhere in the middle, I was raised by parents who might have been scared of nuclear annihilation but weren't scared of losing their jobs and becoming homeless. Some of them were able to pass on privilege, even literally cash savings, to their offspring, but many of my generation have fallen out of the homeowner class as that class contracts back down to historic levels.
Really good point about hippies; they needed to have a certain amount of privilege which they were able to reject.
Another aspect I thought the meme didn't capture was the experience of being relatively poorer than your school peers. Whether that's because you were a scholarship kid at a fancy school, or geographically happen to be in an area where most of the families around have more wealth. It's horrible that other kids treated you badly because of it, and I'm sorry to hear it.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 10:06 pm (UTC)Good point about immigration. My general sense is that a lot of class analysis assumes people mostly stay in the same place, which is obviously a false assumption. There's the thing where it's often people from highly privileged backgrounds who have the ability to emigrate and build a better life, and being immigrants they sort of temporarily drop those privileges but they're still kind of latent and the next generation often has advantages compared to peers from a superficially similar background. That's partly true in my family but a few generations back; my great-grandparents were desperately poor immigrants who didn't really speak English or have any social or financial capital, but their offspring became doctors and were on a completely different trajectory from the offspring of similarly poor but non-immigrant neighbours.
(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 10:57 pm (UTC)The intersectional aspects of schools and education, intensified in the States, are important, as are the attitudes of the society around it.
I had privilege compared to many of my fellow provincials, but I certainly was not of the class that was sufficiently moneyed that they would never have to do a day of work in their life, because they wouldn't be coming to my school.
This feels like it's a piece of a bigger thing, like an Adverse Childhood Experiences test, or similar.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 11:00 pm (UTC)If you told me "I grew up lower-middle class", simply that without any further detail, I would assume that you had parental figures who were basically positive towards education but didn't have the financial resources to buy you educational advantage. That matches up reasonably well to the meme I think though it's obviously very broad.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 11:17 pm (UTC)(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: 2026-02-22 11:47 pm (UTC)The one British person I interact with in my American city regularly is a colleague who went to regular state school and then attended university and got a Ph.D. at Oxford or Cambridge, where he felt very much in the minority as someone who hadn't had an elite education to begin with. I'm not sure where he would place himself on the class spectrum but my guess is something like lower middle class as well. My story is a little different, but it seems like it has some similarities, where I ended up with a college degree at what was (at the time) the #1 liberal arts college in the US through mostly educational privilege not class privilege, and then that resulted in me having dramatically more privilege as an adult than my siblings ended up with. Although also partly because I married someone I'd met in college.
I am also thinking about how the first time I encountered the Invisible Knapsack was at my undergraduate orientation in 2002, and the first time I encountered Crenshaw's work was probably at a faculty training in 2016, even though both bodies of work date from the 80s. Things can take an astonishingly long time to get from academia into the mainstream.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 11:49 pm (UTC)So, with parental support but little understanding and zero ability to help with navigation of the system I made it to a fee paying school on a scholarship and later to a pretty good university (Durham). I could certainly have gone on to post-grad work had I wanted to but 21 year old me wanted a "real job" in the "real world". Which is how at the ripe old age of 23 I found myself running half a factory with 60 or so people across three shifts working for me. I just can't see anyone following that track today.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-22 11:56 pm (UTC)(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 04:07 am (UTC)My mom likes to talk about how she and my dad didn't grow up in rich families (her father worked his way through college and library school on the GI bill after ; my dad's father had a successful career as a Reform rabbi until he died suddenly at age 40 and my grandmother had to go back to work despite chronic health problems), but they did come from families that were rich in their love for learning. I now recognize that is a form of educational/class privilege, though also my mother is someone who loves to share her enthusiasm for learning with the communities around her.
a lot of class analysis assumes people mostly stay in the same place
Yes, I think that this is one of the reasons why class analysis in the US is hard, even setting immigration aside; it's a large country with internal variation in culture, and some people move around substantially within it. Indeed I'd say that one of the main characteristics of the US academic/educated professional class is the assumption that people should be willing to move a long distance for educational/career opportunities.
(I'm pretty sure there are similar stories in the Jewish half of my family, which I don't know as well, particuarly concerning what their background was before emigrating.)
(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.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-02-23 04:23 am (UTC)Relational aggression is less not being invited to certain parties than being invited to parties but deliberately being told the wrong location or date as a nasty spirited prank, or, worse, being invited to parties to be made sport of.
That's partly a consequence of education privilege; I attended schools where getting high marks across the board was admired, not despised.
Or perhaps more accurately you attended schools where the kinds of students who engage in bullying organized around academic performance – typically kids who didn't perform well academically – weren't admitted in the first place?
There are "good schools" which are for those who perform at high academic levels, and there are "good schools" which are for those who are wealthy, regardless of their academic performance. I am given to understand the former are less likely to have problems with bullying and the latter much more so (notoriously more, in the UK, I hear).
(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 04:40 pm (UTC)I'm Italian but I've been living in the UK for nearly 20 years. The single thing that shocked me the most when I moved was the depressing Victorian structure of society and, worse, the attitude to class - specifically the inherent moral judgement on people from lower socio-economic backgrounds and how the entire social system seems designed to keep people where the are from the moment they're born. I can't express how alien all this was to me (as I suspect it would be in other European countries), I can't explain to colleagues and friends how my answers to questions like the profession of my parents or where I went to school don't have the same meaning as if I'd been born and raised here.
Maybe because I do notice these things and because I live in a class-obsessed country, I'm just baffled at the popularity of this meme. But then I remember this site is predominantly US-centric (at least within my circle) and I just wondered, perhaps the discourse around class really is radically different in the US? Your post, the comments, other people commenting on it have really given me an interesting insight and some more food for thought.
(In unrelated news, I'm adding you to my circle because it feels you're a person I'd enjoy reading.)