My own family encouraged reading and education, although I knew plenty of kids in school whose aim was to get a good job with the company (if male) and get any job until marriage (if female). And most of them probably had good lives, at least until the Company moved out of town. I knew someone in university whose entire (and very successful) university career was with the help of student loans and in the face of a family who thought she should have dropped out of high school and gotten a job in store to bring some money into the household. A belief that education was wasteful and unnecessary, was common enough

As for your last comment – I’ve always found that both family and friends generally have to be enjoyed, if not entirely on their terms, at least with the knowledge that there has to be give and take – I don’t expect them to share all my enthusiasms; they don’t expect me to share all theirs, and we try to find some common ground in between. We don’t always succeed, but it’s usually an attempt to draw me into some kind of drama that causes me not to bother with continuing even a superficial relationship – not whether or not someone thinks I’m stuck up or something because I have more education than they do.

Cheryl, your comment about not getting “above oneself” is very true. Even if one didn’t change any attitude about family, merely attending higher education made one suspect among certain segments that one was getting uppity. “Too good for us.”

One time I suggested to my son’s father (after we were divorced) that we send our son, who was scary smart, to the local Country Day School. He needed the challenge. The feedback from his family was that associating with those rich folks would give him ideas (the implication being they wouldn’t be *good* ideas) and that public school was good enough. This from people who had sacrificed to send their own son to law school. !!! So I moved into the best public school district I could find, since I couldn’t afford the private school on my own.

But I always was aware that I had to enjoy my family on *their* terms, that talking about some of my own interests, especially the constant reading, would lead to no good.

I think my understanding of the fluidity of classes is a bit different. I once suprised someone (I don’t know why) by saying that one thing that suprised me when I started university was how many people were the first in their families to attend university. (I was second generation, really, both my parents attended a university). But that wasn’t seen as changing cultural class lines at all. In fact, there was a feeling that if you couldn’t be at least polite to those of your relatives and old friends who didn’t read much or share any of your new interests, you were ‘getting above yourself’ which was bad. It was fine and in fact a considerable source of pride if you got an education and a nice office job and went out to the theatre etc,. but not if you refused to attend family events or were rude or dismissive to Cousin Jethro who had finally got a job at the drive-in (conversely, Cousin J. would come in for criticism if he didn’t handle his money responsibly). I gather from earlier posts that Jane’s experience was considerably different.

Getting more money didn’t seem all that relevant. People seemed to take one of two approaches – people raised poor either had as a primary motivation the desire that their children would have all the toys they didn’t, or that money was a mere tool and should be spent on housing food education etc rather than on lots and lots of toys. Both groups seemed to be in the same social group – they just tried more or less successfully not to sneer at the excess/lack of toys in their respective homes.

So I see class as rather fluid, but fluid in the sense that I can and do have people of varying economic AND social classes among my friends and relationships and casual aquaintances. And I don’t see moving from one class to another as necessarily picking up or dropping all the characteristics of one.

On a side note, after a very mild winter, really, all things considered, we now have a Winter Storm. It is not a Blizzard, although winds are expected to hit 100 kph and anywhere from 10-25 cm of snow, depending on which forecast you believe. But it’s not cold enough for a blizzard. I think the weather forecasters have a special version of the English language!

At least I don’t have to go to work until 11, but since things are supposed to peak just after that, I might have the whole day off!

I don’t think so, and I’ll tell you why. I have a college degree (from a small state college, admittedly), and my husband has 3 Masters degrees. We don’t play the lottery, we save our money and have zero credit debt. We expect to send our children to college (whether they intend to go is another matter). We vote independently, mostly fiscally conservative and socially liberal.

I grew up lower middle class. I know what that is like and the values and interests the lower middle class have. In fact, when I was growing up our family on both sides were staunch auto-worker union folks in Detroit, and all our neighbors were very similar, though we weren’t the good Catholics all the Italian and Polish neighbors were. My dad was the first in the family to take college courses. I was the first to graduate. I am most certainly not there, not in that mindset and not with those values any more.

While I have no argument with the idea that the US is a stratified society, the fact is that it’s a much more mobile society than any other class-based one I can think of. One can’t move into the absolute upper tiers of society freely, given, but then one can’t become a Peer of England by making lots of money either.

We’ve carefully extracted ourselves from the culturally lower middle class by engaging in activities and entertaining values from other classes, and I submit that anyone who wants to do the same, can. As long as they are willing to give up the values of their old social class and embrace the values of the class they aspire to.

Not that I expect the Cabots and the Rockefellers would welcome my son as a suitor for one of their daughters. But I can *live* an upper or even an upper-upper middle class lifestyle if I want to put forth the effort to make that much money. And even without that, I can enjoy art, philanthropy, and the elite snobbery of criticizing everyone else’s choices in home decor and fashion. Ahhh. The Good Life.

This reminds me of something John Adams was reputed to have said. It wss something like:

I study war so that my son can study farming so that his son can study law so that his son can study History.

What John said. But it works at the level politicians want it to work, ie at the next election. Those who are impressed by “soak the rich” rhetoric are too stupid to think beyond the surface attraction of the idea, and that’s exactly why politicians and their running dogs use such rhetoric. They have no interest whatsoever in actually targetting the people who
butter their bread, ie those really wealthy people who are the big party donors.

In Australia, few teachers would ever publicly admit to voting conservative. They would be ostracised by their colleagues and such an admission would probably amount to career suicide. The Teacher Unions are without exception extremely left wing and very militant.

There comes a point where its worth while to hire good accountants and tax lawyers. So “soak the rich” doesn’t work.

I’d also watch the net figure on money. What Clinton took away with one hand, he and his colleagues gave back with the other. The John Edwards element of the ABA does quite well out of Democratic Party policies, and I don’t think the APA has much to complain about in a system which keeps throwing “mental illness” into the same pot as physical suffering, even when the mental condition can’t be consistently defined or diagnosed–and then demanding states and private insurance policies play along. Now if you owned a small factory somewhere, and were making $250 to $500K–but we already agreed that that sort of people just weren’t good liberals.

As for a philosophical libertarianism which doesn’t include voting, campaigning or contributing, I rate that right up there with a spiritualism or religiosity which doesn’t insist you do anything you didn’t already want to do.

It either shows up in behavior, or it’s vapor.