Class structure

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett takes a looks in the Guardian at the preponderance of Oxbridge graduates in British public, media, judicial and business life:

Why the continued respect where there should be scorn and suspicion for those who buy themselves advantages in life and then coast through, seemingly answerable to no one?
Well, I don’t respect it. I’m polite about it, as you can’t blame an individual child for the circumstances of his or her birth whether rich or poor, but I won’t pretend I think any of those privately educated people who dominate Britain are better than you or me (because the chances are you went to state school, too. Most of us did, after all). I’m always going to be more impressed by a kid from a council estate and a struggling comprehensive who gets four As at A-level than I am by someone with the same grades who has been spoon-fed Latin their whole education before being shepherded to repeated Oxbridge interview roleplay sessions.
The question is: why aren’t Oxbridge interviewers impressed by this? Oxford and Cambridge are improving their intake, but progress is slow, and despite the laughable fears of some independent schools that their pupils are being discriminated against, not enough is being done. In 2018 the Sutton Trust accused Oxford and Cambridge of being so socially exclusive that they recruited more students from eight top schools than almost 3,000 other UK state schools put together. That’s simply unjustifiable. Furthermore, it’s a plucky state school child that would stride willingly and confidently into such an environment.

That question she asks, ‘why aren’t Oxbridge interviewers impressed by this’ has so obvious an answer that I’m presuming it is entirely rhetorical… This is how a class system which reifies those from the supposed upper classes functions. It offers a slightly opaque, often seemingly intangible, but very real social safety net and network for and from within those class(es) throughout their lives. The contacts established, the understanding of their privilege, the unwillingness to share or extend that privilege is the very definition of upper class.

Of course, as she notes, those from those classes aren’t ‘bad people’ as individuals but they carry with them assumptions, and privilege, which as it were displaces those who do not have access to the same resources. And there are other aspects to this – a deference to those who have that privilege, and as evidenced by the comments, a remarkable wish to explain away these phenomena as somehow ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’.

One key way to engage with this is to recognise the reality of this and to seek to dilute that privilege.