{"id":494,"date":"2007-06-26T07:47:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-26T13:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=494"},"modified":"2007-06-26T07:47:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-26T13:47:00","slug":"social-mobility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/06\/social-mobility\/","title":{"rendered":"Social mobility"},"content":{"rendered":"

J<\/span>ohn Humphrys<\/span>‘ reports on social mobility<\/a> are a stylish lesson in radio journalism. His delivery, scripting and questioning are a joy.<\/p>\n

The reports offer a great opportunity to hear from voices routinely denied access to the Today<\/span><\/span> programme – the undeserving poor.<\/p>\n

So where did this morning’s piece come off the rails?<\/p>\n

In allowing Alan Milburn<\/span> to spout his full employment, ‘deal with scroungers’ mantra? Or in recycling a little of Robert Putnam<\/span>‘s Bowling Alone<\/span> baloney.<\/p>\n

There are two types of social mobility – intra and intergenerational.<\/p>\n

Intra generational mobility is the kind of boot-strapping that sends shop-floor toilers up to the board room in the space of one career. What’s killing this? Erm…education. In educationalising professional training, children of the better-off vault effortlessly over the boot-strappers.<\/p>\n

Intergenerational social mobility is the kind we see in immigrant families who’ve had to trade down socially in moving country – they set great store in education as a means of getting back on track.<\/p>\n

Of course, the flip side of social mobility is abandoning your friends, family and community for the material distractions of rootless consumerism. As Jonathan Pryce<\/span> so effortlessly declares in The Ploughman’s Lunch<\/span><\/span> – “My parents are dead.”<\/p>\n

Richard Hoggart<\/span> described the experience rather more poignantly in an essay ‘Unbent Springs: A Note on the Uprooted and Anxious’ in The Uses of Literacy<\/span>. He begins the section entitled ‘Scholarship Boy’ with this quote from George Eliot<\/span>‘s Middlemarch<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eliot was writing at the beginning of the 1870s. Hoggart’s book was written in 1957. Half a century on it might have offered a rather better platform than Mr Milburn…<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Humphrys‘ reports on social mobility are a stylish lesson in radio journalism. His delivery, scripting and questioning are a joy. The reports offer a great opportunity to hear from voices routinely denied access to the Today programme – the undeserving poor. So where did this morning’s piece come off the rails? In allowing Alan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15,11],"class_list":["post-494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","tag-bbc","tag-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}