@fmf saidTo be fair that was only after you started dancing rather than answering about your motive behind the OP as stated by me to you above? Maybe it’s just no fun being on the other end of what you do to other people all of the time.
You're bad at it. You should just have a go at responding to the thread topic.
@mike69 saidMy motivation for starting the thread was because I was interested in what the responses to the OP would be. Your response has been interesting but not as interesting as it could have been.
To be fair that was only after you started dancing rather than answering about your motive behind the OP as stated by me to you above? Maybe it’s just no fun being on the other end of what you do to other people all of the time.
@ponderable saidMy parents' "upward" aspirations for their children certainly succeeded with my older sister who ended up a barrister and QC and carved herself a life replete with middle-class attitudes and the trappings. There is no way HER children [my nephew and niece] could be described as working-class in terms of education, values, careers, wealth etc.
I did the upwards way. Being born into relatively poor conditions (four children in one room, no vacations, no membership in any club, no going out for meals, except on very few occasions, no pocket money). I am now rather well off (upper half of the scoiety in both income and wealth). My parents also rose to the upper half of society in that time.
There was no tertiary education for my parents [or any of their siblings] but both my sisters and I went to university and the six grandchildren we produced for our parents all went to university too.
As for the degree to which I was middleclassificated: it's moot. I have spent more of my life outside class-bound Britain than I did living there. Ex-pats are, in many ways, like barnacles on the hulls of cultures when it comes to the issue of social class. So, what social class I might have been a member of in Irian Jaya, or Japan or Java, is neither here nor there.
My observation about supposedly "fair go" and "Aussie battler" Australian culture, having lived there too, is that class is not as sharply defined as it sometimes seems to be in Britain, although the "egalitarianism" and "meritocracy" attributes often attached to the Australian way of life are, to a large degree, a case of people regurgitating the self-propagandizing spin that they were raised to swallow.
@badradger saidIn my experience, and recalling the many people I met who worked in the UK education system, along with those who escaped from it and I subsequently met out here in the rest of the world, 'being a teacher' doesn't, in and of itself, confer middleclassness on anyone. There are plenty of working-class teachers and plenty of middle-class teachers.
my daughter worked in a butchers was a barmaid untill she qualified as a teacher, my son worked in a call center and as a nurse in a mental hospital until he qualified as a teacher both I suspect consider themselves working class
@ponderable saidWhat are your perceptions of the Danes in this regard?
As far as I can say the Dutch are more or less regarded as being more or less teh same as Germans minus the obsession with rules.