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8 - Class and personal socialization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2012

R. W. Connell
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Summary

When interviewing the group of children and teenagers discussed in Chapter 7, I asked in passing what job they might get when they left school. The younger ones said nurses, doctors, policemen, pilots, air hostesses and ballet dancers, much as expected. But the older ones surprised me. A good quarter of those aged eleven to sixteen answered something like this:

GIRL, 12: Oh, I couldn't do it but I'd like to do, something to do with science. [Laughing] I'm not brainy enough to … (What would you need to do to get into that kind of job?) Oh… more brains [laughs], ah, suppose you need a lot of money; I don't know… I'd like to do astronomy or, archaeology or something like that.

GIRL, 13: Well, myself I'd like to be a kindergarten teacher. I've got four brothers and sisters younger than me and I get along with them real good, play games with them on weekends and that. I can get along with children. I'm very patient with them, not like me sister she goes off her rocket [laughs], bashes into them or screams or something. That's what I'd like to be. Or if I couldn't do that, which I don't think I've got the brains really, the intelligence, you know you've got to go all through school and then university and college and such, then I think I'd like to work either in some sort of shop, or then I'd go in for a factory…[…]

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Ruling Class, Ruling Culture , pp. 152 - 189
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1977

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