Categories: uncategorized
Date: 04 September 2011 11:38:37
"The system has failed you so don't fail yourself" is a line from Billy Bragg's To Have and To Have Not. I know young people who that is true for and who my heart bleeds for. They are young people who have ultimately often failed themselves after every aspect of the system designed to support them has failed because they were difficult - due in a large part to the adults having failed them and putting them in situations where they had to work out themselves how to survive in a world they could not trust. That is not to say they do not have responsibilities to take. They have often made bad choices as a result of their refusal to trust a system which was meant to be there to help them. In short it's complicated.
But I don't have that child. I have the one who has learnt how the system works and used it to better themself. I have the daughter who, potentially, has put herself in the position of having recognised the failiures of the system has used these very failiures to build herself a solid basis in which to move onwards and upwards. She has learnt that the failiure of the system depends upon a facade being created that inequality is being dealt with and opportunity is being created. She has used her middle class knowledge and cultural capital to make the best of a bad world and be the person to whom the opportunities are given.
As a parent I should be celebrating and on one level am, but it is all sitting uneasily with me. Third Party is a middle class girl from a middle class home, just one where books have often been more abundant than gas or food. She is a child who was forced to promise on the day the student fees debate happened and the vote went through saddling many of our young people with £27,000 worth of debt in fees that whatever happened if she wanted to do a degree she would go to uni and the fees would not put her off. She is one of those middle class kids from a public sector background who would have gone whatever if she had wanted because the Tory and Lib Dem ConDemNation government were not going to take away her educational opportunity. She is not the sort of person who the right to charge an extra £3000 of fees on the basis of widening participation should be based upon, yet she is.
Third Party and her friends decided to go for it and take advantage of the local university's student progression scheme. They thought they would apply....just because it made sense to do so even if they did not get through. The odd one of them was working class but the majority were middle class kids - they had to be because most working class kids would have not seen the point in going through the process with a likelyhood of failiure. The willingness to set yourself up to fail is a middle class attribute which comes from knowing that some kind of other opportunity will always come along. Now, let me be fair to those who are seeking to widen participation this group of middle class kids were akin to the kids from Glee in terms of each of them had something going on which made them a minority, (illness, faith, etc, etc) and all of them come from homes where money and resources are actually quite scarce - but they are all kids who have some kind of cultural capital.
The scheme I have to say was wonderfully set up and provided opportunities for her which she would have otherwise been prohibited from, but which are standard for many private school kids. She has through it had a real chance to investigate university life and decide that it is not only for her but she wants to embrace the social and volunteering side of it as well. However, the whole thing jars with me somewhat.......have we helped create a new layer of social inequality? Have the guarenteed conditional offer she has been given, subject to a satisfactory UCAS form, and financial incentive of a sizeable level of help towards accomodation each year she has been offered to take this offer been offered to a minority at a unjustifiable cost to the majority? Are we simply creating a new form of state school priviledge for those middle class kids without financial resources whilst we leave those original young people I spoke about, the ones who really need giving opportunities to flourish to rot?
How do I as the mother of a child benefitting from policies I didn't agree with but who sees the way her child is being given what I would love to offer but can't through them handle this one? It is a question I am struggling with at the moment, but one which I feel has to be given voice to. I know none of it is fair but I am b****y glad she has these chances.
It's the same with her part-time job, a student internship. For years I have been one of those people who has struggled with the idea of churches and the individuals within them sending their kids out on short term mission trips abroad, in order to justify the gap year (or gap holiday) experience whilst the kids I spoke of at the beginning have no such opportunities. They are spending money on their own whilst those outside fall apart and local mission fails to engage their contemporaries. But now it is my kid benefitting from these things. Not necessarily the mission trip, although she is as part of the job going to be acting as an ambassador for an agency which engages in supporting aid projects abroad and is having to get her passport sorted. I know her job is going to be hard and challenging and in just applying for and getting it she has had to face and overcome very real issues with which she struggles, but there is still this feeling of she is just another middle class kid benefitting from being middle class and being able to take the opportunities that gives.
This is difficult for me, as a mother I am meant to be proud and I am. I am also well aware of the benefits of the financial element of both the internship and the supported progression scheme from the university. I don't want to sound ungreatful; I am not. I am really greatful for those who have seen something in my daughter and been willing to invest in it.....but there is still this guilt. Am I just another middle class parent who is producing yet another priviledged kid? In taking these opportunities are we effectively taking the bread of those who need it more? I don't know, but I am aware I am struggling big time with middle class guilt at the moment but feel unable to talk to anybody about it because the very people I would normally talk to are those who are either giving the opportunity or those saying I should just be proud of her whilst outlining elsewhere why the opportunities themselves are ones which cause disparity between the resource provision in different congregations or communities. Additionally, I know they are the very people who have also given me huge opportunities and support. It's just....well, none of this sits comfortably. All I can hope is that we both keep hold of the Christian values I outlined in this post and use the opportunities we have been given to help create a fairer world for the young people I spoke about at the beginning.