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What Oxford taught me about posh people

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Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#301

Post by azangru »

> I look at bookshop shelves and wonder where half the stories are. Where’s the book by the girl that works in the laundrette, the man who serves you in McDonalds, the Romanian woman who cleans your hotel room, by the lads that work on the railways or the building site? We don’t care about these people enough because they don’t get heard, and they don’t get heard because we build a success machine that they don’t want to be part of, or can’t access, or use, or afford.

This is a strange sentiment.

How many girls working in laundrettes, or men working at McDonalds, or lads working on the railways, or especially Romanian women who clean hotel rooms, can and do write quality fiction or non-fiction in their spare time and submit it to publishers? Sure, some authors have come from working-class background and had all sorts of menial jobs in their youth, which has made their books all the more interesting; but they also had something else. They had a rare sort of imagination, a love of the written word, an incredible drive to write, and a skill they had developed through continuous writing. At least the posh class is required to read and is instructed in writing as part of their education; so it's easier for the talented among them to discover their talents.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#302

Post by bobthechef »

TchoBeer wrote: post #116
WalterBright wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Work, life, and social structure is extremely unfair It's always going to be unfair. Attempts to fix it always result in some other unfairness. The real thing that works is freedom, i.e. not having the law artificially holding you back. Instead of being consumed by envy of others, you can make your own life better.

That sounds rather defeatist. Is it impossible to make work, life, or social structure more fair? I doubt you think that.

We're being very vague here. What is unfair? Unfairness smells of injustice, and injustice entails entitlement (i.e., something is unjust when I do not receive something that is owed to me). But we haven't named the goods that we're supposedly entitled to. Where's the injustice? Or is it envy masquerading as righteous indignation?

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#303

Post by lbriner »

I suppose that Oxford and Cambridge might be a poor example since I went to Warwick, still a top-5 uni (depending on who you ask ;-) and found the people there to be very welcoming to me, as someone also from a London Comp and a working class family. I was treated as an equal, although I was also 2 years older than most others so that gained me some respect.

There is a deeper issue for sure, which is related to the relevance of University education in many sectors. Medical, legal, humanities probably still belong there since there is a large breadth of knowledge as well as many years of precedence to learn.

For engineering, most people would probably be better off learning on the job, perhaps with day release to college. I found my Electrical Engineering degree far inferior to my college-level Engineering training and more suitable for those who plan to enter research rather than most of us who just wanted a good job.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#304

Post by marcus_holmes »

breakfastduck wrote: post #273
agent008t wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but think that for every student more into drugs/sex/drinking/clubbing, there is a kid out there who was genuinely interested in studying from the top academics that probably didn't even bother applying because they thought they wouldn't be able to get in (or won't be able to afford it). I am also surprised that the culture you describe seems to be tolerated at best and even encouraged at worst. Sure, it…

I think you grossly underestimate how heavily ingrained the things you're complaining about are into UK culture.

"Watching the English" by Kate Fox [0] was a revelation.

I grew up in the UK, and agreed with every word. Especially the bit about social contact and drinking. When travelling in other cultures, I still find it insanely difficult to start a conversation with a stranger unless we're in some situation that I can think of as a pub (and even then it's not easy). The way that random Americans will spark up conversations anywhere is alarming, but I'm envious.

The drinking culture is weird. It's interesting seeing the German drinking culture here in Berlin as a contrast.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watching_the_English

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#305

Post by relativ575 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #236
WalterBright wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rising is due to China turning away from communism and towards economic freedom. Communism utterly failed at making China affluent. Free markets succeeded.

> China turning away from communism... If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO". China has a complicated economy. If anything, China demonstrates that Communism and Capitalism can be made to co-exist in a weird disconcerting way. I don't think it's a particularly good model for how to run things, especially when mixed-in…

> If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO".

Not really. The answer would be "communism with Chinese characteristics". The nuance is in the "Chinese characteristics" part. Whatever that means, but definitely not communism. China or CCP is communism in name only.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#306

Post by lordnacho »

agent008t wrote: post #191

I expected Oxford undergraduates to be the best from all over the world, intensely passionate about their subjects. What I found were kids more passionate about drinking and clubbing and gossiping than studying. There seemed to be some weird hierarchy about who sits where in the dining hall that was completely bizarre. 'Default' social activities organized by the various committees all involved brain-dead clubbing an…

I went to Oxford and felt much like you.

I was totally underwhelmed by the quality of the kids. I'd won a math contest with a couple of Polish kids in my team the summer before, and I thought my new classmates would be much the same: engaged, sharp. Instead I got a couple of fellows who seemed to be there for the drinking. It was quite deflating.

I did eventually round up a number of people with a better attitude, mostly from international circles. It's not like we were teetotal, just the balance of work and play seemed to fit an elite university better. Luckily I managed to forge a group of friends across colleges.

I also started to see there was no logic to who got in. It seemed to be purely a confidence game, especially for the arts subjects. I mean sure, they were probably better academically than your average person, but above some low bar it seems to be a lottery. I started meeting a lot of people who spoke confidently about things, but their confidence did not seem to be grounded in reality. There were so many of these people it gave away the game, I'm not sure I'd have noticed if I hadn't seen this concentration of BSers as a young man.

What was really missing was a love of learning. It's as if the kids had spent years gaming exams under high parental pressure, and now they were at uni as long they could get out with an OK grade they wanted to relax and explore the social world.

The tutorial system was wasted on some of my classmates. It's cringeworthy to be in a lesson with either 2 or 3 students, and one or two of the other kids hasn't done work. I also got proper sparring partners from outside my college, so I did ok eventually.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#307

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

WalterBright wrote: post #146
TchoBeer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds rather defeatist. Is it impossible to make work, life, or social structure more fair? I doubt you think that.

Now that you mention it, the USSR did make many things more fair. They did it by hammering everyone down to the bottom.

The USSR went from being a feudal society to an industrial society with a significant lead over the US in a number of areas, including rocketry and space, within a couple of generations. With a devastating world war in the middle.

There's a lot to criticise about the Soviet system, just as there is any in totalitarian culture - but in science and engineering, "hammering everyone down to the bottom" is simply not what happened.

You could make at least as strong a case for "hammering most people down to the bottom" in the US, because easy and affordable access to high quality education certainly isn't considered a public good, and plenty of talented people are excluded from it.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#308

Post by fyhhvff »

madaxe_again wrote: post #154
AlexSW wrote: post #52

I went to a state school and state sixth form, and my experience definitely deviates from that presented in the article and some other comments here. I think the part of the article which focuses on more personalised teaching rings the most true for me. There may be differences due to the subject, level, or college. I did a one-year masters in STEM in a very international graduate Oxford college. But the vast majorit…

In U.K. collegiate universities, like Oxbridge and Durham, there is a huge cultural divide between colleges and courses. I went to Durham. I was - I am - a posh kid - albeit one who’s acutely and painfully aware of his advantage. The college I was in was stacked to the rafters with posh kids. Everything orbited the social life - the balls, the ents, who was where in the pecking order of committees and executives. I m…

What is an "ent"?

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#309

Post by marcus_holmes »

azangru wrote: post #301

> I look at bookshop shelves and wonder where half the stories are. Where’s the book by the girl that works in the laundrette, the man who serves you in McDonalds, the Romanian woman who cleans your hotel room, by the lads that work on the railways or the building site? We don’t care about these people enough because they don’t get heard, and they don’t get heard because we build a success machine that they don’t wan…

I think that's the point. The education for working-class people does not encourage imagination, writing (or even reading) for pleasure. The state school system is designed to turn out conforming factory workers (literally - that's what it was founded to do).

How many Einsteins spent their lives working in a coal mine because that's the only thing that their entire upbringing prepared them for?

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#310

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

WalterBright wrote: post #208
thu2111 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book you cite doesn't seem to support your argument. Firstly, you say they nationalized many industries but the book talks about individual companies. Nationalizing an industry means nationalizing every company within that industry. Secondly, this does not appear to have been motivated by the failure of capitalism but rather the opposite. It was done in response to union strikes. Unions are usually understood as…

To be fair, Roosevelt in his 1945 State of the Union Address advocated for imposing forced labor on American civilians. Fortunately, that went nowhere.

Many people working in the US today would disagree.

The fact that the forcing is done with debt and threats of homelessness and not at gunpoint is just an implementation detail.

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