Florence King Quotes

The anti-elitist values in America, I think, are very destructive to education.

Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

The issue is the so-called educated few against the great democratic many.

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

Only 28 percent of American adults have a college degree, but most of us in this group find ourselves in workplaces in social milieus where almost everybody has been to college. A social chasm is opening up between those in educated society and those in non-educated society, and you are beginning to see vast behavioral differences between the two groups.

Class and the snobbery it provokes still matter far too much in Britain, but we are a far more mobile society than we used to be.

I don't believe in private education.

For many centuries Chinese society has been free of class distinctions such as are found even in advanced democracies.

And if we don't have a test, what we may end up doing is going back to what this country has done before. We could use social class and we still do, but in the 50s, it was, do you have the right last name and are your parents in privileged positions?

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Labor, under their current leadership, want to be the Downtown Abbey party when it comes to educational opportunity. They think working class children should stick to the station in life they were born into - they should be happy to be recognized for being good with their hands and not presume to get above themselves.

If education does not create a need for the best in life, then we are stuck in an undemocratic, rigid caste society.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

Better educated than wealthy

In this respect, higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality and strengthening class structure of the United States.

Surrounded by the evidence of their success, the wealthy come to believe that they are fundamentally better than other Americans and that working people deserve their declining fortunes. They trumpet meritocracy while ensuring that their children enjoy crushing advantages from birth. They have unprecedented access to politicians and use it to push policies that swell their wealth while defunding institutions, such as public education, that sustain opportunities for less-fortunate Americans.

In countries like India or China, a Steve Jobs will never come around. The fundamentals aren't there - there's this feudal hierarchy.

American computer science grads often have very little exposure to the human condition. They've rarely had manual labor or service jobs. They grow up in a bubble of privilege lulled into thinking this country is a true meritocracy.

All countries have poor people. Yet it's a very rare country which understands the indignities of poverty, while education systems maintain the status quo. The children of the elite go to the best schools and get the best jobs, not because they are the best. We're not taking advantage of the intellectual power on this planet.

Growing up in Middlesbrough I was taught to be resilient and competitive. My teachers made us believe that just because kids were at private school up the road, it didn't mean they were better than us.

As class barriers tumbled and Britain became a more meritocratic society, young, well-educated Scots were best placed to exploit the new social mobility.

The want of education and moral training is the only real barrier that exists between the different classes of men.

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.