The Children's Social Class

Wealth can be inherited and, despite death duties, some inequality of income perpetuated. A high income enables parents to give to their children the advantages that money can buy. It is a great help to a child to live in pleasant surroundings, be provided with educational toys, to go to a private school with a high staffing ratio, to receive stimulating experiences such as foreign travel in adolescence, and to have the entry into the 'right circle'.

The family not only transmits material benefits to its offspring, but also passes on some of the more indefinable and immaterial aspects of social class. The child undergoes social experiences of power and prestige upon which his ideas of class are built.

The ways in which his parents treat others and are treated by them give him the clues as to how he should later deal with his superiors and inferiors in class position.

Children of primary school age seem to mix very freely with children who to adults appear to be obviously of another social class. In rather the same way they ignore such adult caste boundaries as color in choosing their playmates. In both cases, however, it appears that they recognize that there are differences but do not know the social customs associated with these differences.

Each social class has its own particular way of life. Many examples can be given of the differences between the middle and the working class. What is considered right behavior varies; for example, each social class treats its women in a different way. Table manners and what is eaten and drunk vary greatly. It is possible to view each class as having a culture of its own. Strictly these ways of life can be seen as sub-cultures of the overall national culture.

Each subculture will entail a separate pattern of socialization very different in some respects from that undergone by the children in the families of another social class. These sub-cultures are characterized most obviously by the differing outward behavior, such as the drinking of tea at the evening meal instead of water, or the watching of a game of soccer instead of the playing of a game of golf. But it will be shown in this section that at a deeper level there are differences even in the basic personality patterns and modes of thought found in the social classes.

The working-class mode of infant care was characterized by a pattern of indulgence led to a lack of self-discipline in older working-class children and adults. These very different ways of socialization led to markedly different patterns of personality. The working class does not control their basic psychological drives in the same way as the middle class does. The working class tended to extremes. When money was available, they over-ate and overheated their rooms. They used aggressive action much more often, and this was particularly so with regard to sex.

These ways of behavior are approved as normal among the working class, whereas the middle class directed the identical drives into channels that were socially approved in their sub-culture.

Working-class aggression become middle-class initiative; the same psychological drive can take the form in a working-class child of actually striking a teacher and in the middle-class child of hard work leading to good school marks that would earn him the name of 'teacher's pet'.

What evidence is there for similar personality differences? The general population and the broad patterns of indulgence might be expected to lead to the two opposing personality types. The initiative and self-discipline typical of the middle class can be traced back to the pattern of middle-class infant care foundations lay partly in the early patterns imposed with regard to feeding habits and toilet training and in the way the mother tried to love her child out of wrongdoing.

The differences by social class that were noted in the techniques of socialization used in early childhood were reinforced by the changed methods that were suitable for the child at the age of seven. The parental attitudes to their child's play, his complaints about school and the expression of sorrow after being angry towards him.

Therefore, although extremes in type of personality cannot be assigned outright to the broad bands that make up the working and the middle classes, yet it approximate descriptions of the basic personality found among many in the middle class and among certainly a large proportion of the lower working class. In between these social classes it seems likely that there is a continuum with the basic personality tending towards one or other of the extremes according to the social class being considered.

The teacher, who is more often than not from the middle class, has to deal mainly with children from the working class and may well find that one of the main demands put upon him, if he is to achieve success, is the adjustment that he must make in order to teach children, the majority of whom have a very different pattern of personality from his own. Neither pattern is deviant in any moral sense; both were formed through the normal process of social class learning, and within each broad pattern there are very many individual differences of personality.

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