Доклад по теме The social class system

SOCIAL CLASS MAKE-UP

Britain has a deeply individualistic society also described as a class-ridden one. Though in 1990 John Major announced: "We will make the whole of the country a genuinely classless society'" in fact he failed for the gap between rich and poor grew during his 7 years premiership. So class is still a feature existing in English society and the English are class-conscious. The strangest feature of class in Britain is that it is not entirely dependent on money. It seems that one can be high class and poor or low class and rich. This system is based on historical tradition which doesn't exactly match present conditions.

The following class division is observed today (according to market research): A (class) - Upper middle class (senior civil servants, professional, senior management and finance) - 3% B - Middle class (middle managerial [maenidzirial] - 16% C1 - Lower middle class (junior managerial/clerical, non-manual workers) - 26% C2 - Skilled working class - 26% D - Semi-skilled/unskilled working class - 17% E - Residual [rizidzual] (dependent on state benefit, unemployed, occasional and part-time employed) - 13%

The working class is rapidly declining. Since 1950s there has been a massive growth of the middle class. The middle class embraces a range of people from senior professionals, judges, senior medical specialists to clerical workers - in other words, almost all people who earn their living in a non manual way.

Beyond the middle class lies a small but powerful upper class which survives from one generation to another. The top 1% of wealth holders probably own about one quarter of the nation's wealth.

The peculiarity of the British class make-up is that there are no peasants at all. There are farmers and their hired (mostly for a season) labourers, which make a part of the working class. Less than 2 % of the working population work on farms though over three quarters of Britain's land is used for farming.

The weakest group are retired people, single women and people belonging to ethnic minorities.

The class system

"We are, by our occupations, education, and habits of life, divided into different species, which regard one another, for the most part, with scorn and malignity," wrote the 18th-century man of letters, Dr Johnson.

Every country in the world has a class system. But in some way, for some reason, the question of class seems to have a special meaning for the British. This is reflected in their image abroad. Hollywood films have featured lots of upper-class Englishmen, always snobbish and usually cruel or stupid. The whole world knows the stereotype of the English gentleman or lord, often with a monocle and tweed jacket, sipping whisky and reading The Times. Our class-ridden reputation goes back a long way: in 1755, a French traveller named Jean Rouquet wrote: "The Englishman always has in his hands an accurate pair of scales in which he scrupulously weighs up the birth and rank and wealth of the people he meets."

The British themselves are obsessed with the issue: it is at the centre of countless novels, plays and films, and the topic comes up again and again in the news media. A vast proportion of British humour is based on the interaction between upper and working classes. Public figures occasionally state that the class system is at the root of the country's problems, or alternatively that the class system is dead.

The strangest feature of class in Britain is that it is not entirely dependent on money. It seems that you can in certain circumstances be high class and poor, or low class and rich. This is an important clue to the conundrum: the system must be based on something historical which does not exactiy match present conditions. And that is precisely what Britain has: the royal family and all the dukes, earls and barons are a relic of feudalism. Although these vestiges of the old aristocracy add up to very small numbers of the population, they set the tone for the rest of die class structure. At least 200 years ago, the commercial middle class triumphed over the old land-owning nobles (and Napoleon called the British, "a nation of shopkeepers"), but in terms of style and attitude the victory has been the other way round.

A note of caution here: official statistics, of course, treat class as a stricdy economic distinction. Government figures have mosdy been based on a six-point scale of employment-types, very similar to the one below, which is used by market-researchers and advertisers

Marketing people are the ultimate experts in questions of class - they have to make sure that advertisements for Mercedes cars and Rolex watches go in newspapers read by the As and Bs, and advertisements for cut-price cigarettes and car batteries appear where they will be seen-by the C2s,DsandEs.

However, unlike government statisticians, but in common with the rest of the British public, marketing people know that there are many other indicators of social class. Upper-class people cook French food for an evening meal which they call dinner or supper, and they drink wine with it; they watch tennis and rugby; they read The Times or The Daily Telegraph, they name their sons Piers or Edward, and their daughters Rebecca or Sophie; they listen to classical music; and they buy stocks and shares. Working-class people microwave ready-made supermarket meals for an evening meal which they call tea, and they drink tea with it; they watch snooker and football; they read The Sun or The Daily Mirror, they name their sons Darren or Paul, and their daughters Ashley or Lizzie; they listen to pop music; and they buy lottery tickets.

These are stereotypes, of course, which are humorous and only half-true. More seriously, the two really important indicators of class are education and accent. George Bernard Shaw wrote a satire on the linguistic aspects of class in his play Pigmalion, in which a professor takes a poor ockney flower-girl, Eliza Doolittle, and turns her into an upper-class lady by training her to speak with the right accent. In the preface to Pygmalion, Shaw writes: "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him." In simple terms, the higher the class, the more the accent resembles that of the royal family. Whereas most ordinary people have regional accents, the upper classes speak in exactly the same way from the south-east of England to the north-west of Scotland. This would seem a remarkable achievement, considering that children normally taken on the accent of their surrounding community rather than that of their parents. The explanation is the schools they go to. The most central unifying feature of the upper class is that its members go to private, fee-paying schools. Just 7 per cent of pupils in Britain are at private schools, which are quite expensive: the top ones such as Eton (for boys) and Roedean (for girls) cost £15,000 per year. So it is actually quite difficult to maintain your position in the upper class without a lot of money.

The British class system could be dismissed as just a piece of folklore, which makes a visit to the country all the more fun. But unfortunately it seems to get in the way of economic progress because important jobs do not always go to the most able people. While the rest of the world long ago decided that meritocracy was the way to develop successfully, relics of the feudal system still hold Britain back.