UK School kids and the crushing hammer blows of inequality!

Yeah, so basically you're all doomed to a life of grinding poverty, unless you've got rich parents in which case you're laughing!

Read it here, then print it out to use as a blanket to protect you from the icy winds of poverty and despair.

The Olympics and Class

Did you see the Olympics?  Great, wasn't it?  Obviously, the ability to jump higher/run faster is not that much of an achievement anymore, in fact it's pretty useless since we're not cave dwellers fighting each other for the scraps from a revently deceased Woolly Mammoth or running away from one of those old tigers with the massive teeth but it would be churlish to bring this up after our runners/jumpers/make-a-horse-do-a-dance-ers did so well. 

Anyway, from a sociological point of view the Olympics matter because in the last Olympics, which were somewhere abroad I assume (I didn't watch that one) most of the British Olympic Team (NOT 'Team GB'!  NEVER 'Team GB'!  'Team GB' is a nauseating Americanism and if you say it you are a traitor. FACT!) had attended Private School, so there was a debate about CLASS and INEQUALITY and people saying 'Blimey, these rich people seem to have unfair advantages due to their enormous wealth, yadda yadda yadda, say something less blindingly obvious whydontcha?  Anyway, this time round, there was a slight change to the debate as it seems a few more peasants/state school kids won medals.  Here are some articles discussing it:

1  2   3

Get a proper job you posh pillock.

Education's Great Class Divide

Article from today's Independent...

Read it here!

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

'This persuasive book about the label 'chav' makes a nonsense of the idea that Britain is now classless' (The Guardian)

Review

Video: Owen Jones discusses chavs in Stockport

Like watching videos featuring odd-looking people wearing bad clothes, surrounded by inflatable trees?  Then you'll love this:

Video: Book Review



Also, international hip-hop git Plan B talks about the demonisation of youth/chavs in this TED talk from about 11 mins!

Superclass - The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making

Adonis and Pollard (1998) claimed that there is a ‘superclass’, whose power transcends the traditional upper class.   Rothkopf (2008) developed this concept by compiling a list of the 6,000 most powerful people in the world.   His book is examined in further detail below...
Bit about it here...

Review

Video clip of author discussing the Superclass

The Superclass List

And listen here from 13:48 for a BBC discussion of the Superclass.

60% of chart pop acts are privately educated...and Olympic athletes are not much better.

Yes, it's almost a year old so I can't claim to have my finger on the pulse but this news article is interesting...

Marxism, false consciousness, the illusion of a meritocracy, the relentless march of the bourgeoisie etc etc?  Discuss...

BBC 28 Jan 2011

Laa dee daa floppy haired fops.

Bang-up-to-date fodder for the class war can be found in this Daily Telegraph article here.  Which includes terryifying statistics such as 'In the last three Olympic games, an average of 50 per cent of medal winners were educated at public school (while) just seven per cent of the general populace went through the private school system'.