Cults and classes
Defending the middles
Graham Jones
"Anyway," an undergraduate closed his letter to the paper for which I work, "I find this cult of the working class quite perverse. Everyone knows the best standards and values come from the middle class."
The class structure in Britain is, of course, more fluid than ever before. There are Jaguars now in the colliery car parks. And many in what were once seen as middle class professions (such as teaching and the Church) are walking a financial tightrope. Though those masterminds from the market research bureaux who decide our social station (rather like the inventors of school reports) by grading us A, B, C, D or E still use employment as their criterion.
It is of but academic significance whether this scheme — devised presumably to help advertisers plan their TV commercials — has any more value than Lloyd Warner's status groups or the prediction by both Marx and W. S. Gilbert that society is necessarily composed of two distinct factions.
But while the precise boundaries of social classes have preoccupied sociologists since Comte, it is possible to discuss their broad relevance — as demonstrated by correspondence to my paper about the number of students from working class backgrounds at British universities.
We can all understand the "middle class standards and values" the writer quoted was talking about. These are clearly identifiable: a moral code, with the emphasis on responsibility rather than hedonism; a belief in the importance of education, learning, and knowledge; an appreciation of music, literature and the arts; a desire to preserve fine architecture and naturally occurring beauty, and a pervading critical outlook as society steamrollers on. In no sense are all of these exclusive to the middle class. No social group has a monopoly of artistic or musical genius. Every one of these middle class values can be acquired.
But the contribution of the British middle class cannot be disputed. They are largely responsible for maintaining our artistic tradition. For the health of our theatres and concert halls — directly by their patronage, and indirectly by their pressure for government arts subsidies. Could there have been an Edinburgh Festival in any city which was not so predominantly middle class?
The middle class have helped assign education a high priority in our national culture; and they have been, in recent years, the spearhead of the conservation movement. The preservationists by no means always possess a concrete case against the planners — but if the voice of the middle class was never heard, the bulldozers would always triumph.
Just as they have been an economic buffer against the excesses of planning and development, the middle class have helped provide a political buffer — the value of which has not been in preventing change, but in subjecting change to critical scrutiny. This is the value of conservatism: it is a political philosophy which is not reactionary, but selectively progressive. Middle class conservatism can be as doctrinaire as working class socialism; and it remains that neither socialism nor conservatism is purely class based. But the net political leaning of the middle class is lower case conservative. And this provides their impact on society. The moral principles of the middle class have been an important cohesive factor this century, as the importance of religion has declined. These values have adapted successfully (and indeed, still are adapting) to a changing world. With the advent of mass contraception, the former middle class call for self-denial, has, through social workers and family planning officers, evolved into the call for responsibility. Yet middle-class principles are much maligned; they are often portrayed as reactionary or obstructive. Rarely are the middle class praised for their essential contribution to the social fabric. There is a growing tendency to deny the importance of a middle class ethology in schools: the idea abounds among teachers that working class children should not be introduced to such an alien culture. One Manchester headmaster has rewritten those bastions of middle class idealism, the Janet and John books, with the idea that they should be made more identifiable to working class children. Thus instead of Janet and John looking up harmlessly pointing to aeroplanes, we have children "thumping" and "slugging" each other. Instead of Janet and John's mummy lingering conveniently in the background, ready to answer any awkward questions about the big, wide world, we have a working class mother prone to "fetching" other women a "right swipe." Words for the children to learn are predictable: "karate chop," "five-to-one-on" and "Roy Hattersley." (though this presumably will soon be up-dated to "Reg Prentice").
All very amusing: but behind it is the notion that what the headmaster says finds favour with 84.473 per cent of teachers, that working class children should not be weaned on such middle class dogma — a statement which is as disheartening as it is indicative of the growing use of pocket electronic calculators.
Middle-class values are of paramount importance in education. They provide the principles for the pursuit of knowledge and the appreciation of music, art and literature. They propagate a code of behaviour necessary for an optimum state of human co-existence. Education should be a means to increasing and enriching children's experience. Society can only become narrower if a self-satisfied, hedonistic working class approach to life is promoted as the ideal, and anyone who courts middle class values is denounced as a snob.
This is the attitude implicit in Coronation Street — an excellent, successful and highly entertaining television programme: but nonetheless a programme in which the one character who espouses middle class values, Ann Walker, is a subject of derision. She is ridiculed by her fictional neighbours because she flirts with moral principle, has artistic pretensions, and wishes to make more of her life than fritter it away smugly on a Lancashire back street.
This is the cult of the working class our correspondent found so perverse. And while his assertion that "the best values and standards come from the middle class" was unqualified and superficial, it was at the same time both valid and sagacious.
Graham _Jones is a leader writer on the Glasgow Herald
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