Not for you: what ‘experts’ debate tells the working class

Interesting and thought-provoking article highlighting the perennial problem of integration of working class students within the higher education system. However, the 'experts' debate is an important exercise in self-examination for the academic community at this time of unprecedented potential for dangerous division based on class, age and urban/rural demographic. Academic 'experts' must question why their expertise is not valued by the non-academic community - is it possible that the latter feel that their legitimate anxieties are treated with condescension by the inhabitants of the academy, some of whom may never have engaged in the kind of work that imparts life skills that can never be learnt from a text, however brilliant? This is a debate worth engaging in for those who care about the impact of (almost) universal education. Regarding the issue of how working class students can reconcile their background with the academic world which remains largely populated by the middle classes - I fear they cannot! As a working class academic I empathize with the writer, but this is an issue that even great minds such as Freud and Marx would have struggled with. However, I would suggest that working-class academics remain close to their roots in order to counteract the almost inevitable descent into condescension that membership of the contemporary academy appears to cultivate.

Class origins appear to have more impact in some scholarly areas (i.e., humanities) than in others (i.e., physics). One suspects this difference is related to the major difference with how how an "educated " man is defined in the two fields; F.R. Leavis ( in the Snow-Leavis debate of the 1960's). Leavis points out that an "educated" man has little use for "higher mathematics" but a tradesman might well find them useful in his working class job. This despite the major advances made in the physical sciences (and technology) in the past few decades, in part a consequence of wide use of higher mathematics by engineers with working class origins