Winseer:
Rjan:
[…]There is indeed this tendency to use “broad brush strokes” at the way we define others, for sure.
That’s just inevitable. If you explain to someone how to drive a car, you have to start with very general statements, and then fill in the details as complexities as you go, and allow people to gain a feel for it from experience.
The tendency for the younger generation to be more “Left Leaning”, I’ve always felt is more about Uni Indoctrination, which of course is something that this ex-grammar school kid didn’t get exposed to, and therefore didn’t swing left around the same time as my testicles did in life.
And yet there’s no evidence that university graduates have ever, on the whole, been lifelong left-wingers.
I suspect the stereotype arises because more working-class people went to university in the post-war period, on intellectual merit, and from the point of view of the middle and upper classes, these working-class graduates probably tended to be more left-wing and sympathetic to workers on economic issues (and unlike the average loudmouth shop steward, these graduates had been given educations to take the bosses on intellectually in their own terms), and from the point of view of the working class, these working-class graduates tended to come back from university more (like the middle class) socially liberal and freer of the crude prejudices of insular and hardscrabble working class communities.
For example, the latter was the basic original story of Ken Barlow in Coronation Street, exploring how university life had left working class graduates disjoint from the communities they had come from, in terms of their attitudes and outlook.
On a somewhat related and real-life note, I once read Gordon Brown (the ex-Labour PM) expressed resentment for the fast-track education he’d received as a boy in the 1970s, and the think the implication was that part of the problem was that his experience and treatment had isolated him at the time (and the small minority of others similarly schooled) from his wider peer group and community.
At any rate, liberal social attitudes are now the norm, and the working class has mostly abandoned left-wing politics, which is probably why the stereotype is less noticeable and resonant nowadays.