Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Does class still matter?

"Class still matters"

  • Total voters
    180
Like it or not people still judge you by there preconception of you, which includes the way you look, the way you dress and their idea of social class. Look around and you will see it clearly on here.
 
Can't vote "strongly agree" 'cos that would align myself with those nutters who think class is the ONLY thing that matters.;)
 
It's difficult to have a useful discussion about it without defining what you mean by class. Are we talking about class as a cultural identity, class as a social relationship or class as a way of describing social inequality?
 
Yeah, class matters

Stop poorer dying younger

Boys born today in East Dorset and Kensington & Chelsea can expect to celebrate their 80th birthdays in 2086, but those in Glasgow City in Scotland (where male life expectancy rates stand at 69.3 years) will be lucky to reach 70, according to a new study released today by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP).
Click to expand...

Life expectancy gap 'widening'

The joint University of Bristol and University of Sheffield team found a 10-year difference in life expectancy between the best and worst areas.
Click to expand...

Poverty and inequality in the UK

The long shadow of childhood: associations between parental social class and own social class, educational attainment and timing of first birth

Army disproportionately recruiting in schools in deprived areas

Number of Working class students 'to fall'

Private schooling key factor in career success

A study examining the educational backgrounds of the 500 most influential people working in politics, the media, medicine, law and business reveals that more than half had attended fee-paying independent schools. That compares with the tiny proportion of pupils - just 7% - who are privately educated.
Click to expand...

Over half country's top journalists went to private schools

Declining/stalled social mobility in Britain

Gap Between Rich And Poor Widens

Children who cannot escape the poverty trap

A child born to a labourer is six times more likely to suffer extreme poverty by the age of 30 than one born to a lawyer, a major study has revealed.

In a remarkable portrait of childhood in Britain, academics have exposed a society in which inequalities are entrenched and social mobility is a myth. Millions of bright children face 'multiple deprivation' in adulthood simply because of the circumstances of their birth.

Those born into disadvantaged families in 2000, it concludes, have slipped further behind their middle-class counterparts by the age of three than those who grew up in the Seventies.
Click to expand...

Class segregation 'on the rise'

100 schools 'dominate Oxbridge admissions'

Premature deaths

1899.gif


Religious schools 'show bias for rich'

Damning new evidence that faith schools are siphoning off middle-class pupils can be revealed today, as research shows they are failing to take children from the poorest backgrounds nationwide.
Click to expand...

Networked from birth

Still, the bare facts are there, for those who wish to make something of them. While in the UK only 7.3% of the population go to private schools, 59% of Conservative MPs were privately educated. Of the 27 members of David Cameron's shadow cabinet, 17 went to private schools. Last summer, a smattering of reports drew attention to the fact that no less than 14 Tory frontbench spokesmen were educated at Eton alone. To be fair, such high-flyers as William Hague and the shadow defence secretary Liam Fox keep their comprehensive-educated end up - but Cameron's circle of friends, colleagues and associates is, perhaps inevitably, dominated by men who once spent their school days cloistered near Windsor, dressed in top hat and tails. They include his speechwriter and "ideas man" Danny Kruger, Tory MPs such as Hugo Swire and Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Cameron's avuncular guru Oliver Letwin and his stepfather-in-law Viscount Astor. The shadow chancellor George Osborne, it should be noted, went to the London school St Paul's - but managed, once he'd got to Oxford, to make it into the "Buller", among whose members he was reportedly known as "Oik".

Last year, figures obtained under the Freedom Of Information Act revealed that Oxford admitted almost twice as many Old Etonians in 2006 as in 2001, and that the figure for alumni of Westminster School was up from 14 to 52 (at the last count, 60% of Westminster's sixth formers got places at either Oxford or Cambridge). When you look at the array of research put together by the educational charity The Sutton Trust, the picture is pretty quickly fleshed out. In the past 18 years, for example, the proportion of privately educated high court judges has barely shifted: in 1989, it was 74%; in 2007, it was 70%. And anyone who sees the media as some forward-thinking meritocratic milieu should think again: to quote from one of the Trust's reports, "the proportion of independently educated top newspaper editors, columnists and news presenters and editors has actually increased over the past 20 years".
Click to expand...

A postcode lottery of life and death

Deprived areas data reveals cancer survival divide

People who live in the most deprived parts of England are less likely to survive cancer than those who live in more affluent areas, according to figures published yesterday by the Office for National Statistics.
Click to expand...
 
rioted said:
cos there's SO much difference! :hmm:
Click to expand...

The two are not unrelated but they are definitely different things and like Idaho says the reason these discussions quickly become confused unless everyone agrees on a definition at the start.
 
BigPhil said:
I would say India is much more obsessed - but it's called the caste system
Click to expand...
That's a different thing to class as it exists in most of the world though. Class isn't about some rigid set of social categories that you are born into and will absolutely, definately remain in for life (at least as far as people who use it as a tool for analysis are concerned).
 
Frampton said:
The lower down you are in the food chain the more you realise that class is very much alive.
Click to expand...

This is very true.

The people most likely to talk about a classless society and that it belongs in the past are almost always from the affluent middle classes.
Ask people on any social housing estate and you'll get a very different response.
 
in my opinion, someone who argues that class (however defined) isn't important or doesn't exist as a concept anymore, is someone who doesn't, or hasn't, had experience of being at the bottom of the heap essentially.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

R
Oceangate's Titan. The Bayesian yacht. Why do the deaths of rich people matter more than poor people?
5 6 7 8 9
Replies
248
Views
9K
ghost boy
ghost boy
Humberto
Missing persons. How many families does it happen to?
Replies
12
Views
832
cupid_stunt
cupid_stunt
hitmouse
A general election thread for posting literally every single tweet that you see, no matter how inane
Replies
7
Views
757
Yata
Yata
YouSir
Class in Academia
2 3 4
Replies
118
Views
4K
Funky_monks
F
hitmouse
Class background and the arts
Replies
1
Views
362
killer b
K
Back
Top Bottom