I recently read an essay by a writer friend (and self confessed ‘ex sociopath’), Jeanette Purkis, who was talking about a cycle of poverty in which those born poor stay poor. Whilst this is often so, what intrigued me was that she was specifically referring to those born to families who disrespected education, authority and the law as though this was synonymous with ‘the poor’.

I grew up in a working class area, born to uneducated and, at that time, relatively poor parents, but the fact was I learned there was a difference between my family and those deemed ‘working class’. Sure we both were dressed thanks to the charity shops, but our families probably had very different outlooks.

The working class families had a parent who would show up for school reports, not just threaten to punch the teacher’s head in if called in for anything they deemed ‘stupid’. The working class families had aspirations for their children which involved a healthy respect for formal education, marks, reading and qualification leading to work.

Working class kids generally don’t come from a long line of criminals and substance abusers. They generally don’t have a parent or parents who encourages the kids to stay home when they don’t feel up to driving them to school or feel like a bit of company whilst doing the shopping. The working class family may not mock all authority figures or cast a reverse prejudice at those with education or a professional or academic position. The working class family may have cared if your library books were overdue or if the homework was done.

Underclass families can be poor or they can make money, often ‘dirty money’. They are usually the first to claim their dodgy ways were ‘only fair in an unfair world’, that ‘the system is corrupt so it is righteous to find ways to beat it ‘at any cost’. They are always the first to ask ‘what are you reading that rubbish for?’ when you threaten to show attention to anything that may lead down the murky path of enlightenment but be glad enough if you browse the narcky gossip magazine or the tabloid newspaper full of breasts and plastic surgery and alien abductions. But though shalt not dare to watch the non-comercial TV stations, the less mass production radio stations and certainly not if a chop-em-up xxx video is available for the kids to watch.

I was largely unassessable at secondary school and went through four of them, including six months off, before being pulled out of school at fifteen. I had learning challenges, emotional challenges, behavioural challenges, sure. I spent most of my time kept out of my classes by the co-ordinators rather than in them. Such was the nature of the relatively ineducable beast that was me at that time. But my home culture didn’t make it any easier. Not only was formal education not valued, it was seen more as a source of free babysitting, its value was not understood, was socially removed from the universe of my parents and, in my mother’s case, in spite of being an excellent reader (the antithesis of my probably dyslexic, somewhat ADHD father) there was a generational attitude passed down which showed anything from an active disinterest to an outright distrust and disrespect for education. It can’t have helped my own feral attitude in schools.
My older brother was pulled out of school by age twelve. Such was the way that bullying was managed. There was no such thing as negotiation or discussion, just confrontation and removal. It probably worked both ways. Teachers can recognise when a dangerous parent comes through the school gates and they are far from willing to discuss long with a parent who clearly ‘has an attitude’. There’s something in those determined, cold eyes that says this person is a hitter, not a talker and usually that’s been passed down, generationally. That same parent may well have had a grandfather happy to come down the school with a shotgun if the teacher dared set a foot wrong.
I tried to encourage my younger brother to finish secondary school, but his attitude to education had festered years before and he was going through the motions. Only I went back, becoming that most unfathomable sell-out, an academic success, dare we blaspheme, a ‘professional’.

I played down this achievement for it still had an air of stigma. It took me many years to understand why I should mention that honours degree, that post-grad diploma in education. Yes, of all things, I qualified as a teacher. The underclass side of my family didn’t even know what my qualification was. When my cousins went to jail and needed someone to write a letter, my name was raised as someone who could write a letter for them because I was ‘some sort of psychologist or something’. But it took months before anyone got around to asking. Underclass folk ‘take care of their own’. They don’t like turning to ‘them’, to ‘outsiders’.
My father was proud of me. He was a man with two years of primary school under his belt who could barely write and his conversation consisted of endless characterisations and hilarious anecdotes told, ad nauseum for the 100th time, but usually he’d still make you laugh. This guy was the class clown who grew up. Now he entertained strangers as a wheeler-dealer. One could say he was underclass by default, not attitude, not ‘inheritance’. But that was the limit. From the others there was silence on the matter. It was almost unmentionable if not a sort of snicker-worthy joke. Though nobody said it, I felt it was clear I had stopped being ‘one of us’. I was ‘one of them’ and the forks were out. I was now fair game.

The poisoning of my mind had been unsuccessful. I was hopelessly open-minded.

… Donna Williams

http://www.donnawilliams.net