Modern “Education”
Fri 3:55 pm +00:00, 21 Mar 2025
Source: https://miriaf.co.uk/the-plumber-and-the-paupers/
I’ve just posted the intro, more at the above link
===========================
I know two young men, both approaching the age of 30, who were born just months apart in the mid-nineties. We will call them Aaron and Zach.
Aaron was born on a northern council estate to unmarried parents who both left school at 16 with few qualifications. The household was low income, and, before he had reached secondary school age, Aaron’s parents had split up. Aaron went to a local comprehensive school, where he qualified for free school dinners, and left school at 16 with a handful of GCSEs.
Zach was born in an affluent part of the south to married parents who had both graduated from one of the world’s most prestigious universities. The household was high income, and Zach attended a private school. His parents stayed together, and funded his education through to university. Taking a year out between A-levels and university, Zach graduated with an arts’ degree aged 22.
Fast forward a few years, and one of these two young men is currently earning nearly £40,000 a year and living with his long-term girlfriend, where they regularly enjoy meals out, music festivals, and travel. He is confident, enthusiastic, and optimistic about the future.
The other has recently been laid off from his part-time minimum-wage bar work, and is staying rent-free in a friend’s spare room whilst he desperately searches for more work. He is single, can’t afford much of a social life, and struggles with anxiety and depression.
Can you guess which is which?
Conventional wisdom would tell us – and would have been right up until about ten years ago – that the high-earning success story would be graduate Zach, whilst it was school-leaver Aaron struggling with employment, housing, and mental health.
After all, Zach began life with every advantage, whilst Aaron’s upbringing was a textbook example of underprivilege. The kind of backdrop Ken Loach might make a film about, with a 5-star review in the Guardian overusing the word ‘stark’.
The reality?
It’s actually Zach, the middle-class son of affluent parents, who is so profoundly struggling, and working class Aaron who is enjoying the solvent, successful life.
How did this happen?
Following a period of stacking shelves after he left school. Aaron decided to seek out an apprenticeship as a plumber, inspired by another lad he knew from his estate who was doing just that. It took Aaron quite some time to secure a place (apprenticeships are competitive, and, aged in his early twenties by then, he was considered a bit on the old side). But he persevered, found a place, became the scheme’s star pupil, and completed his apprenticeship aged 26, graduating to a salary of nearly £30,000 – which has, and will continue to, rise as he accrues more experience. He’ll never want for work again in his life.
Zach, conversely, upon graduating from university with an arts degree aged 22, was completely unable to find work in his graduate field – or in any graduate field. He applied fruitlessly for dozens of jobs, and, eventually, found bar work, securing a full-time position in a busy city-centre bar.
But as the bar struggled to make ends meet post-pandemic, his hours were slashed first to part-time, and then his position was terminated altogether.
Realising that there is not only no future in the the graduate field he’s qualified in, but that hospitality doesn’t represent a secure future either, now Zach is facing the prospect of retraining as he approaches his thirties – but in what?
Most trades would consider him too old for an apprenticeship, and he’s not good with his hands, anyway (like many young men of his age, exposed to the ramped up ’90s vaccine schedule, he has a dyspraxia diagnosis). There’s no point going back to university for another useless degree, and to accrue more whopping student debt.
(Aaron has no debt: he was paid a liveable wage throughout his apprenticeship.)
So what now?
A similar dilemma faces many.
Aaron and Zach are real people, with just a couple of identifying details changed, and there are more and more like them (there was even a meme made about them once) – and they reflect a burgeoning new reality: that a monumental social shift is taking place, which will totally transform and redefine the concepts of work, class, money, and social status as we know them.
Aaron, the young plumber, is “working class”, a term which has, historically, been used by some as a pejorative, meant to suggest a person might be lacking in certain aspirations or abilities, as opposed to the supposedly more rarefied “middle classes”.
Yet all that is set to profoundly change. In the near future, “working class” will become a badge of great prestige and honour – as in, the class that works, those people who play vital social roles and keep society going – as opposed to the idle, surplus, useless class, who don’t.
