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posh kids 23:25 - Jun 8 with 1365 views

stumbled across this, quite a good read if you have 5 mins:

What Oxford taught me about posh people
The dreaming spires hide a vicious sense of entitlement.

There’s a scene in the movie Good Will Hunting where the working-class genius played by Matt Damon makes fools of some arrogant students in a bar, by knowing way more about their subject than they do. They’d been mocking his friends for their crudeness and stupidity, but they end up leaving with their tail between their legs.

I’m no genius, but I do know something about the social dynamics in that scene, because I kind of lived it.

All my friends got labouring jobs at the ages of fifteen or sixteen. To us, students were the middle-class kids who didn’t work, then left to go to “uni.” They never really came back, or if they did, they returned just to boss us around. Our home, for them, was something sh1tty to escape from. In their world, everyone babbled endlessly as if everything they had to say was fascinating. In our world, if you spoke self-importantly, people told you to shut the f**k up. They thought nothing of us; we thought nothing of them.

My experience of secondary education wasn’t good. I sat for five years in a crumbling comprehensive with thirty other bored working-class kids. There were fights in the corridors, bullying, shoplifting down the town at break times. We threw things at teachers, dragged our feet and our bags between lessons, and resisted every well-meant attempt to change us. Often disillusioned and half-broken teachers did their best to hold it all together. I hated it. I left as soon as I could with nothing to show for it.

My education might have ended there, but a decade later, I was talked into going back to school by my girlfriend. I got my A Levels by taking night classes at an adult education centre. A teacher there suggested I apply for university. I decided to give it a go. I didn’t tell my friends.

I was building a dry-stone-wall by a roadside, mulling over which through-stone fitted best, when the postman stopped to hand me a letter. He was a lad I’d been to school with. I opened it while I was chatting to him, and he seemed baffled when I told him the letter said I’d got into Oxford University. “But you’re thick like me,” he said.

After he’d driven away with a friendly wave, I thought, “How will I tell everyone?” Was I about to become one of the people I’d grown up hating? In fact, my people were proud of me and cheered me off to war against the posh people (they’d seen Good Will Hunting too).

I went for two main reasons, and neither of them were very nice. I went because our farm was struggling and had become very claustrophobic and small, way too small for me and my dad, and because I needed a new hustle: everyone I knew who had money seemed to have gone to university. But I loved books, too, and liked the idea that you could study just one subject, and skip the rest, which was handy as I was useless at most of the subjects. But it was terrifying. I didn’t want to leave the place and the people I was from, or give up being who I was. I wanted to come back afterwards, but had no plan for how that might work.

Going to an elite university exposed me to the people that made me most nervous: the well-spoken, (supposedly) clever people. My first instinct was to flee from this strange new world with its archaic traditions, funny language and weird social habits. But I was too proud to go home defeated, so I decided to fight instead. It didn’t take long for me to realise that the posh kids were all leather shoes, woollen jackets, small-talk and bullshit. I soon shrugged off the idea that there were some mystical clever people somewhere that were better than me: I’d now met them, come up against them one on one, and they were often bang average. I could hold my own on anything substantive. I’d grown up among straight-talking tough people who loved to argue in smoky pubs, so Oxford tutorials felt strangely familiar.

If I’d been confined to a plastic chair, and told to sit in silence and listen for an hour to someone who wasn’t very interesting talk about a subject I hadn’t chosen to be interested in, I suspect I’d have messed about and misbehaved, just as I did as a teenager. But Oxford wasn’t like that. The teaching was personalised, flexible and interactive. That kind of system keeps people like me in the room, fired up and engaged. Kids like me, who don’t flourish in school, can benefit from such attention, and focus, and belief. A good society would strive to give it to them.

But posh kids still dominate these institutions. I learned, when I was there, that their trick was not any kind of genuine superiority but pure conditioning. Their schools and families had taught them that university was as much a social rite of passage as an opportunity to learn. They aimed high, in terms of grades – and to be fair, often worked very hard to pull it off. I was from people with lots of excuses for not doing things out of the ordinary; posh kids strode into their extraordinary future with their heads held high. No one I knew had that kind of polish and swagger, but I soon realised you could fake it. I looked at them and thought: if you f**kers can do remarkable things, then why can’t I?

It was liberating to find that I was clever enough, if I worked hard. And I knew how to work hard – for hours, days, weeks and years. OK, my people didn’t achieve highly in education or the professional white-collar world, but we were proud farmers with a culture of striving. I simply switched that mentality and applied it to education – something I hadn’t realised was possible at school. I knew the posh kids couldn’t outwork me. And the fact that I’d failed a lot was a strength, faced with their easy but brittle confidence. I knew how to get back up off the floor. People from more disadvantaged backgrounds than mine often lack this self-belief. But what if they were surrounded by people and institutions expecting and helping them to excel, as the posh kids were?

So much of this is about self-fulfilling prophecies. For years university worked because we believed it worked. It turned out “clever” people for “clever” jobs with good salaries, and sent the rest down the mine, to the factory or the farm. No one asked whether these students were really the most intelligent people. The system just confirmed the advantages of birth and background. My odd, and entirely untypical, journey exposed me to the extremes of the British education system. It has left me with complicated feelings about what universities can and can’t do.

A lot of people treat you different when they think you are an Oxford graduate than when they think you are a farm labourer. They talk to you differently. They talk to you more. They invite you to their house and try to make friends with you. They talk about books. Some of this is perhaps based on not unreasonable assumptions. Some of it is just lazy snobbery. I knew people that would talk down to me or my friends because they thought we weren’t very bright or worth very much. With those people I’d shamelessly mention having been to Oxford to knock them back a bit. It was like sprinkling fairy dust. They’d shrink back as if I’d said the password – or worse, start fawning, when five minutes earlier they’d thought I was northern, common, and knew nowt. Snobs and the powerful fetishise ‘academic’ credentials. I didn’t even pick my degree up, but it didn’t matter. Once you are in the club the detail isn’t important. You just have to look at our leading politicians. Boris Johnson would be stacking shelves in Aldi or working down the chippie if he’d been born in Hartlepool.

My story is sometimes seen as a rags-to-riches tale. But I wasn’t exceptional; I was lucky. The point of this story is that a society that is blind to the potential of so many of its young people, is a wasteful, unfair and ineffective society. I look at bookshop shelves and wonder where half the stories are. Where’s the book by the girl that works in the laundrette, the man who serves you in McDonalds, the Romanian woman who cleans your hotel room, by the lads that work on the railways or the building site? We don’t care about these people enough because they don’t get heard, and they don’t get heard because we build a success machine that they don’t want to be part of, or can’t access, or use, or afford. Instead of a fair system, the machine churns out entitled mediocrities, born to be heard, born to rule.

And though universities are trying hard to become more “accessible”, there is only so much they can do. Perhaps it’s too late by the time the kids are eighteen. And if working class kids don’t apply, what can an admissions system do?

Around this time eighteen ago, I was sitting down to take my final exams. I did well. I could probably have stayed and become an academic, but I was drawn home to my own landscape and work – to the place and people that made me. Oxford didn’t make me, as a person, or a writer, but I’ve returned there over the years. The people that once taught me seem sad. They say it has gotten worse: the posh kids arrive, use it, then leave to work in the City.

And perhaps all the debt this training requires means that the kids are right to be mercenary about it all. Work hard, get the grades, move to London, do the job, get promoted, earn more, pay it back. Love of subject, creativity, taking risks and experimenting: these things feel marginal. I can see why people are sceptical about universities, and angry at the elite ones. They are often now little more than training camps for the stormtroopers of capitalism. I may have been lucky to go when I did.

I went to Oxford too, we lost

Poll:

Which kid would you give money to?

posh kids on 08:23 - Jun 9 with 1294 views

onehunglow

Good read .Here' my take.
My Grammar school was a place for bullies and the day I left was joy;I remember it like it was yesterday.
We had the "posh" boys from Mumbles /Newton/DF and the others who'd passed the 11+. We had some from the lower Swansea Valley,like Clydach who spoke with strong accents. They were treated with les reverance than the "posh" boys.

I felt more comfortable with the valley boys and those from others parts of Swansea. I admit the posh boys used to boil my pee with their faux ,misplaced sense of importance. I spent much time fighting with them behind the fives courts and between lessons too.

When I left school,I promised myself I would never ever, in an way, see the posh boys a in any way better or smarter than me. I am in no way intimidated by "better" speaking people and have laughable contempt for the truly posh talking jerks.

Ive seen many go to public schools manly because they were thick and their parents had money and couldn't be 'rsed with them.How is that priviliged? I felt sorry for them.I still do.
This country is obsessed with class.If it's not present they make it up.It is pitifully so British a trait to accentuate humility and reverence taking the knee in the process when in the company of the "posh". We see people glorying in being "poor",and being willing to be branded as working class. They have regional accents too when those "posh" from down south ,mainly,do not. They speak English better. No they farking do not. Bland jerks is what they are.

So,my poor,working class under privileged readers ,get off your knees and do not succomb to this pressure and be proud,aspire to better things and if meeting someone deemed Oxbridge type,stand your ground. They read more books and hence that way increases their ignorance as they BELIEVE what they see in print,always. Books are often people's opinions;no more than that.

As for inviting thee people into your home-jut do me a favour. I d rather have a cabal of Welsh speaking sheep farmers . No offence.

Have a great day

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Christmas. Enjoyable or not

-1

posh kids on 10:37 - Jun 9 with 1269 views

Catullus

We should all dare to dream. As we get older we need to weave those dreams into our realities.

It doesn't matter how od you are, we should all have dreams of better. Right now I dream of kicking a football with my son and to get a bike and go for a long ride, small dreams that will be possible after tomorrow.

PS, I never dreamed of going to Uni, I'm not comfortable with posh people despite having grown up around people who thought they were posh. I've met people who looked down on me because I was a postman, because I was a football fan, other reasons too and in the end I found myself looking down on them. I was once judged a failure in life because I had no ambiton to get promoted, to keep earning ever more money. My point of view was my ambiton was to be happy, as long as I had enough money to pay my bills and have the occasional treat that was fine by me.
Snobbery, looking down on people without knowing who they are, not for me. University among "posh" people, not for me.

[Post edited 9 Jun 2021 10:45]

	Just my opinion, but WTF do I know anyway?
Poll:	Offended by what Brynmill J and Controversial J post on the Ukraine thread?
Blog:	In, Out, in, out........

posh kids on 13:29 - Jun 9 with 1223 views

Whiterockin

posh kids on 10:37 - Jun 9 by Catullus

[Post edited 9 Jun 2021 10:45]

Hope everything goes well tomorrow and may all of your dreams come true.

posh kids on 13:33 - Jun 9 with 1221 views

DwightYorkeSuperstar

posh kids on 10:37 - Jun 9 by Catullus

[Post edited 9 Jun 2021 10:45]

Good luck with whatever is happening tomorrow.

Poll:

Should MP for Swansea East Carolyn Harris resign?

posh kids on 14:34 - Jun 9 with 1186 views

Boundy

posh kids on 10:37 - Jun 9 by Catullus

[Post edited 9 Jun 2021 10:45]

Sometimes dreams are best left to being just those. I can hold my own in a conversation regardless of whom it may be with . I remind myself that when ever I feel that I'm being talked down to that they have the same needs, bodily functions to perform , just as insecure as the next man and probably look a mess when naked ( a great leveller ).
Good luck with the op , my mum in law had her's replaced when she was 86 , with no side affects and up and about in days so you'll be fine .

"In a free society, the State is the servant of the people—not the master."

posh kids on 14:36 - Jun 9 with 1183 views

onehunglow

posh kids on 10:37 - Jun 9 by Catullus

[Post edited 9 Jun 2021 10:45]

Thinking of you mate.

Btw,Our Postman is the most loved ,respected and popular man one could imagine. He receives serious Christmas tips of gratitude .

On other hand ,solicitors ,by and large, as seen a beneath contempt, as are accountants, surveyors and other uni educated professional men.

Ive never felt uncomfortable as an adult mainly as I judge face to face and do not respect any profession apart from Doctors and Dentists .

I met a Judge on hols in Barbados. Highly esteemed educated posh uni and much deferred to. Nah,big houses ,small houses ...meh.

Poll:

Christmas. Enjoyable or not

posh kids on 15:25 - Jun 9 with 1154 views

chad

posh kids on 10:37 - Jun 9 by Catullus

[Post edited 9 Jun 2021 10:45]

Hey cat my thoughts and very best wishes will be with you tomorrow for your op at last.

Just over 15 years now since I had the second of my 2 hip ops (6 months apart). I was so nervous but did not know a thing and totally transformational for me as I was dragging myself around on crutches. Thought it would feel a bit robotic after but felt totally natural. Don’t forget the physio if you can, the pool is great for exercise too to get the muscles etc. back in tip top shape :)

15 years on mine still serving me well (touching that wood), never been able to bite my toenails since though ;)