Many members of the new group have just arrived, pushed to the top by
the necessities of war or of Britain's long economic struggle. The
percentage of public-school graduates is lower than in the established
middle class. Attention to that class's recognized totems is much
less. The new group is less concerned with the Church of England, the
Army and the Navy--the Air Force and the production of new weapons
are, however, its special province--the Foreign Office and active
politics. These it has left largely to the established middle class,
and frequently the interests of the two groups clash. For example, the
conflict within government between the traditionalist view of the Navy
as vital to Britain's defense and the view that all that matters is the
big bomber today and the intercontinental ballistic missile tomorrow is
essentially a clash between two groups in the same class.
The new group is not primarily managerial, although managers make up a
considerable percentage of its total. It includes a great many creative
workers, architects, scientists and engineers, and a surprisingly high
percentage of men who have risen without the aid of the Old School Tie.
The group has had less education and less leisure than the old middle
class, and, consequently, its approach to culture is different. Its
interest in the arts is limited, its taste in literature tends toward
Nevil Shute rather than Thackeray. But it has a furious curiosity about
Britain and the world: it devours magazine articles and books. Like
the new working class, it has reached income levels that seemed out of
sight fifteen years ago, but, unlike the new working class, it is not
content to rest in its present position. For it knows enough of the
world and the country to doubt that the present security is enough.
The middle class in Britain over the centuries has developed a
marvelous capacity for altering while maintaining roughly the same
façade. This process is going on now. The sons of the new group within
the middle class are going off to public schools and Oxford and
Cambridge rather than to state schools and the red brick provincial
universities that trained their fathers. But because this group has an
abiding interest in technical education, its members are anxious for
the spread of such education in the old classical schools.
It should be noted that the trend toward the public schools and the
great universities is not due entirely to snobbery. As an industrial
engineer told me, "That's still the best education in the country,
and my son's going to have it." He himself was the product of a state
school and a provincial university. Obviously he enjoyed talking about
his boy's public school.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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