Class, my friend, is dead

I had my relatively laid back feelings toward class issues kicked back into touch again by the ongoing saga that is a fellow student in one of my lessons who was privileged enough to attend a private boarding school before somehow ending up in the same boat as the rest of us poor common people who attend the state funded college of South Downs.
Class background is something I do my best to never raise as some form of ad hominem attack or criticism, we can’t help the situations that we find ourselves born into, something that applies equally to the rich and the poor. However the girl in question (who will remain anonymous as is my policy in these situations) seems to hold such a deep level of contempt and disdain for those people who were state schooled that I feel she had left me no option but to comment upon her background just as she does mine.
The use of private schools is something that I am opposed to in a political sense, I do not believe that it is justifiable for children to be given a better education merely because their parents can afford to send them to a privately funded school rather than a state funded one, it creates division, it reduces opportunity, it fosters class separation and it propagates elitism and if I can just drop the objective tone and refer to my gut feelings just for a second I’d like to make it clear that I fucking hate every aspect of such issues.
Today was the point at which I felt unable to sustain my cheerful concessionary attitude to repeated snide filled insults which make much of my alleged inability to pronounce the name of Atreus, my ‘nonculture’, my ‘pathetic’ grasp of the English language and my woeful knowledge of sentence structure in a situation whereby the individual felt it necessary to denounce me and three colleagues as ‘uneducated’.
I gently reminded her that we were all educated at various state schools which did not actually put us through a four year intensive course of Latin combined with ancient Greek translation tasks to which her reply was that we were ’synonymous’.
I don’t know perhaps she just thought we wouldn’t understand what synonymous meant and therefore felt it would suffice as an insult alone, unluckily for her she failed to qualify her sentence and I couldn’t resist doing so.
So we would be synonymous of the fact that those individuals who are not fortunate enough to be born into a wealthy family can not expect to receive as good a standard of education as those who are, we would be synonymous of the raging class inequalities that this snob ridden dump of a country labours beneath, we would be synonymous of the fact that an education which cost the same amount that half the population is expected to live on gives a greater range of opportunities to the recipient than an education provided by the state, we would also be synonymous of the fact that despite all of this we have picked up the subject at a later stage when the horizon was granted to us and we are all, to a man, performing exceptionally well.
She looked rather taken aback by such an outburst but failed to respond in any other manner than a ‘harrumph!’ of disdain.
Obviously she is not a great ambassador for people who have gone through private education but as I have stated above I do my best to stamp out any prejudices I have against an individual because of their background and don’t believe that she represents the majority of people who were privately schooled so rest assured this is not an attack on the people but the system.
In our days of meritocracy and the social engineering of the Labour government the very fact that such schools can be so widely used and so socially acceptable is nothing more than a pathetic joke, they are a tradition which keep our class prejudices alive and kicking.
The hope is that they can be tackled by an increase in the quality of state education, an equalling of subject choice, teaching quality and environment that can only be achieved by a serious overhaul of the education system.
First and foremost Teachers need to be attracted to working for the state rather than a private school and one important issue is that of pay, lets forget the fact that people do something because they feel a commitment to society and go with the cynicism that they do it for the money, its not ideal but you have to fight a war with weapons even if you don’t like them. Pay state teachers a better starting wage, a better all round wage and maintain a decent benefits package for their eventual retirement make state schools the more attractive choice for teachers and rip the heart and soul right out of private schools.
The subject choice needs to be extended and the opportunities increased and this is a matter of funding, attracting the right staff and maintaining the right level of teaching for different levels of ability. Basic education needs to be concentrated upon, it’s all very well and good talking about citizenship classes and general studies but what is actually going to help people is being able to write, read and add up, these are BASICS, once they are learnt then all else follows, anything is easier when an individual has grasped the basics and it allows somebody to choose a subject area not out of desperation brought on by an inability to do others but out of choice and the knowledge that it can be done.
The focus needs to be less on filling a bucket and more on lighting a fire, a thirst for learning and an appreciation of education, people should not be treated as though they are cogs of some vast machine which deserve nothing more than the bare minimum required to make them economically viable no fuck that, they need to be given the opportunities to pursue their subject interests and to do so they should never be constrained by the finances of their family. They should be encouraged to see themselves as individuals who are capable of chasing whatever dream they might have and screw all this bullshit about people from bad families being naturally drawn to a life of working in a MacDonald’s and engaging in casual violence, that is a result of having such assumptions pummelled into people from an early age and I refuse to believe that you can justify writing somebody off because of their background. The opportunity needs to be there and it needs to be based on democratic equality not financial eligibility
Anything to eliminate the smug complacency and pseudo-justifications of people who willingly contribute to social division through some pathetic form of self interest and complete ignorance of social collectivism.
Anything to save future generations having to put up with a person who feels they can act in a superior manner, safe in the assumption that because of their highly privileged start to life they can look down upon others with the disdain of an aristocrat.