by Being a class mongrel We were working class, and you don’t lose that. Later on, I bolted on middle classness but I think the working-class thing hasn’t gone away and it never will go away. Quite a few of my interactions and responses are still the responses I had when I was 18 or 19. And the other things are bolted on and it is a mix. It is what it is, and a lot of people are like that. I’m a class mongrel. Melvyn Bragg Most people think of social mobility as something unproblematically positive. Sharing much the same experience as the one Bragg describes, it is difficult to share that sentiment. Becoming — basically through educational prowess — part of the powers and classes that for centuries have oppressed and belittled the working classes can be
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Being a class mongrel
We were working class, and you don’t lose that. Later on, I bolted on middle classness but I think the working-class thing hasn’t gone away and it never will go away. Quite a few of my interactions and responses are still the responses I had when I was 18 or 19. And the other things are bolted on and it is a mix. It is what it is, and a lot of people are like that. I’m a class mongrel.
Most people think of social mobility as something unproblematically positive. Sharing much the same experience as the one Bragg describes, it is difficult to share that sentiment. Becoming — basically through educational prowess — part of the powers and classes that for centuries have oppressed and belittled the working classes can be a rather mixed experience. As a rags-to-riches traveller, you always find yourself somewhere in between the world you are leaving and the world you are entering. Moving up the social ladder does not erase your past. Forgetting that, rest assured others are more than happy to remind you. The social mobility many of us who grew up in the 50’s and 60’s experienced, only underscores that the real freedom of the working classes has to transcend the individual. It has to be a collective endeavour, whereby we rise with our class and not out of it.
At the collective level, social mobility is no solution to either educational inequalities or wider social and economic injustices. But at the individual level it is also an inadequate solution, particularly for those of us whose social mobility was driven by a desire ‘to put things right’ and ‘make things better’ for the communities we came from and the people we left behind.