![]() ![]() In the fiction of Victorian Britain and Gilded Age America the office worker was a miserable, stunted figure-Scrooge's assistant Bob Cratchit, or Bartleby the scrivener. In the eighteenth century yeoman farmers and aristocrats alike despised the "greasy mechanic," who by the early twentieth century had been promoted to middle-class factory worker. In medieval England "clown" and "villain" were words for the farmer who later became the symbol of middle-class rural America. Over the years the social prestige of various economic sectors rose as the middle-class center of gravity passed through them. The "fat and frolicsome" yeoman farmers of Crèvecoeur and Jefferson became the well-paid factory workers of William McKinley and Henry Ford, and then moved to the suburbs to become white-collar "organization men" (or, less frequently, women) after World War II. Thus the American middle class has migrated from sector to sector over the past two centuries. What makes the United States and similar societies middle-class is the economic predominance of the middling sort, no matter what their major source of employment happens to be. But when Americans talk about the middle class, they are not talking about burghers or the bourgeoisie. In the pre-modern societies of Europe the terms "burgher" (German) and "bourgeoisie" (French) referred to the minority of largely urban merchants and professionals who were above the peasant majority and below the minority of landholding aristocrats. What exactly does it mean to say that the United States is a middle-class society? It has always also been an economic paradise for the middle class-at least until now. Most, however, wanted what previous generations of European immigrants had sought: "America has been peopled by Europeans primarily because they expected in that country to make more money more easily," Herbert Croly wrote.Īmerica, then, is not simply the land of political liberty. Of the millions of people who came to the United States following the resumption of large-scale immigration in the last third of the twentieth century, a few were refugees from political or religious persecution. The equation of America with widespread middle-class prosperity persists today. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. Wives and children, who before in vain demanded of him a morsel of bread, now, fat and frolicsome, gladly help their father to clear those fields, whence exuberant crops are to arise to feed and to clothe them all without any part being claimed, either by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. But Reeves says the class gap in education continues right on through college.What, then is the American, this new man?. In the end, the Brooklyn Heights school rezoning went through. ![]() ![]() But it is the result of the interaction of those different kinds of systems which many of us benefit from, and candidly we'll support those sorts of exclusionary mechanisms, because it's in our short term immediate self-interest to do that. It's not that anyone sat down and said look let's do some devilish scheme Let's let's find a way to rig the system and design tax and education housing like in this way. 307 had served predominantly low-income, minority students with lower test scores. When the city's education department rezoned the area two years ago to ease overcrowding in P.S. 8 is predominantly white, with test scores considerably above average. Take this elementary school in New York City's affluent Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. It's like an X-Ray that exposes class fracture when schools get involved and when you think about kind of integration. ![]()
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