Being a Teacher must be one of the most beautiful and the most depressing jobs in the world. Beautiful in respect of the romanticised notion that the children you work with are young, innocent, care free, filled with optimism, hope, and above all else potential. Depressing in respect of the fact that you as an adult know the reality of the world they will step into and understand that whilst you have hope they will go on to greater things and you strive to give them the best foundation to do that, the reality is that the majority of them will not.
In the UK, former leader of the Tory party William Hague admitted that social mobility had died and that 90% of workers in the UK never progressed beyond their entry level positions. That means only 1 in 10 people actually climb that metaphorical ladder when it comes to careers. Now he wasn't citing an actual statistic and you can dismiss it as hyperbole but the sentiment it expresses is something that people are increasingly waking up to the reality of - you're not going to climb much higher than wherever you are now. That's incredibly depressing for anyone who doesn't like where they are now.
For a teacher it must be quite miserable to look at a class of 30 students and think that only 3 of them will actually go on to do better than the environment they were born into.
We're led to believe there's a ladder we can climb up if we put the effort in to doing so, but that ladder was torn down long ago, replaced with an elevator that's out of order but the sign telling us this is missing, so we step inside and press the buttons and nothing happens. For the rare few it actually moves them up, and for the unlucky few the whole thing plunges down into the depths below.
The question of what to do about this broken system might not be to ask how to replace the ladder or the elevator or whatever metaphor you want to use for social mobility. The real question might simply be to ask why people want to move up in the first place, the answer to that is quite simple, the lower down you are the harder life is for you and the less opportunity you have, but what if life was comfortable? What if life at the bottom offered you enough opportunities to do what you want in life, would that negate the desire to move up? Probably not, as there is the question of greed too that can't be overlooked, some people want to move up for the simple reason that they want more, not for any altruistic reason but just for the sake of having more, those people are perhaps the ones who would never be content to stay where they are, regardless of how comfortable it was or what needs were already met. What about the people who aren't greedy though, would they be happy staying where they are if it was comfortable and offered opportunity?
In the UK perhaps more than anywhere else in the world we have an undercurrent of "class warfare" - this plays a part in British society and has done for centuries. To some it is this ideological conflict that motivates the desire to separate and segregate. What would happen if this were actually achieved? If social mobility really did die completely and nobody ever moved from one position to another whether that be because they aren't able to, or because there is no desire to do so, what impact would that have on society? There is the often touted statistic that divides those at the bottom and those at the top along the division of 99% and 1% respectively. This statistic if it holds true would mean that the population at the top is quite small. Small populations eventually succumb to a number of defects that stem from the limited gene pool, ultimately they are unsustainable. It becomes necessary for procreation to be managed in order to overcome these deficiencies, which in itself opens up a whole can of worms about selective breeding and eugenics which gets very dark and very twisted very quickly so let's pull back from that.
Assuming the two never mixed 99/1 there is the question of whether or not the 1% would actually survive in the long run. Part of the reason why the 1% of the population has never collapsed is because that 1% is not fixed. It is a statistical segregation, it's not a physical one. In practice the 99% and 1% mix all the time. In fact those who cross from one class to another are often labelled "class traitors" by those who hold more extremist views about social mobility. The defining line between the 1% and 99% is lower than you would think though. In the UK if you earn over £40,000 a year you are part of the top 1% of earners, those at the other end earn considerably more than £40k this demonstrates the difficulty using arbitrary divisions. As for savings, that's harder to define, what we can say however is that 60% of the UK has less than £100 in savings, so if you have more than that then you've already passed the median.
Those who hold extremist views are the most likely to be in favour of complete segregation, but would that actually have an impact? If the current 1% all died off, would their wealth be redistributed evenly? Again, probably not. Even if it was, how long would that new-found equality last? Would it be sustained or would a new 1% develop? I think the answer to that lies in historical precedent, the fact it emerged in the first place without any grand plan to create it is evidence that this division is something that manifests itself. The question is why?
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