Common Sense on ...

Class, education and talent

HOSE WHO WOULD DENY to William Shakespeare the authorship of his works are exemplars of a pervasive and pernicious class prejudice.

It is speciously assumed in such arguments that great writing proceeds from great formal education. But this is not borne out in reality, where many of the world's finest writers have been, like many people of talent, primarily autodidactic.

That the supremely talented should spring more often from the ranks of the lower and middle classes than from those of the upper is quite logical, if for no other reason than because those classes constitute the vast majority of any society.

And the deperate truth about education is that it has always been a function of class.

So it is that the United States military of today practices the most comprehensive program of institutional discrimination against the lower social castes — er, classes — ever witnessed in a reputed modern republic.

Essentially, the upper class are commissioned as officers, while their less affluent congeners serve as lower-paid enlisted underlings. Not a matter of class, of course. Perish the thought. It is the possession of a college degree that makes the difference. Not class at all; just education.

Except that, in a society whose best jobs are fast fleeing overseas and whose college tuitions have become flatly unaffordable to a great many of the less pecunious, education becomes ever more what it always has been: a function of class.

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