Epilogue: thinking through class

In Education and the Working Class Jackson and Marsden included an appendix that was nominally about further research, but in essence was the two authors thinking through class in education. I would like to end with a personal reflection on thinking through class that attempts to capture some of their ‘visionary gleam’ and transpose it to the 21st century.

Keeping people stuck in segregated areas, in demeaning jobs without sufficient income and consigned to a life with little hope and prospect that things will get better can breed racism, bigotry, ignorance and narrow-mindedness. Such attitudes have nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of the people themselves and everything to do with the consequences of their circumstances. So the important thing to do is to change those circumstances – in the workplace, in the local area, and also in schools and classrooms. And we should not expect people to transform their own lives when they haven’t been given the resources to make that possible. That’s unfair, it is expecting miracles when miracles very, very rarely happen.

But I see the direction my own life has taken as a kind of miracle. Pierre Bourdieu, who had a similar miraculous trajectory, said in an interview in 1992:

I have a similar need to understand, and this book has been part of a process of thinking through class – both my own changed class position and also relationships between the class I am now ambivalently part of and the class I have left. That leaving was at times traumatic and laden with grief, even as it was being desperately yearned for.