Vikas Swarup Quotes

Cultural dominance of middle-class norms prevail in middle-class schools with a teacher teaching toward those standards and with students striving to maintain those standards.

I was very much a product of the public-school system. There was only one other kid in my class who had parents not involved in the stock market or law.

Outside of the family, education is the greatest determinant of social mobility.

I went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn't know how the world of the American elite works.

Just because someone doesn't have a silver spoon in their mouth doesn't mean they can't be highly intelligent.

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.

Social class has worked for years. Born into the right family, go to the right schools, even if you're not super bright to start with, you'll turn out bright. You go to the right university, you get the right job, you have the right connections, you'll make it to the top. Job done, very efficient.

I grew up a middle class, colonized child of teachers and librarians and people, women especially, who treasured education.

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.

I hate to be smart.

My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.

Where but in America could a European thinker convinced of the elite nature of genuine education produce pupils who would go on to make common cause with populist politicians?

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.

Better educated than wealthy

I hate uneducated people having power …

Class division in knowledge goes deeper than any other class division.

Each class of society has its own requirements; but it may be said that every class teaches the one immediately below it; and if the highest class be ignorant, uneducated, loving display, luxuriousness, and idle, the same spirit will prevail in humbler life.

Some men will be always able to pay more for their children's education than others; and that those children will, inevitably, win in the struggle of life.

There seems to be an idea abroad in this land as well as in others, that a certain class of people are for the purpose of producing servants for another class of people, and that this servant-producing class has no right to give their children an education that is calculated to elevate them above the position of their parents. We are not in sympathy with this idea.

The typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: a) he constantly proclaims belief in human equality, but they don't ; b) he has a high IQ, but they don't.

We once had a society stratified by bloodlines, in which the Protestant Establishment was in one class, immigrants were in another and African-Americans were in another. Now we live in a society stratified by education. In many ways this system is more fair, but as the information economy matures, we are learning it comes with its own brutal barriers to opportunity and ascent.

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.

Everyone praises Harvard 'for the students.' But what makes Harvard's students so great is that they are, in many ways, a cross-section of the larger world. They are normal people who happen to be excellent, and this sets them apart. People who go to Yale go because they want to attend Yale. People who go to Harvard go because they can.

If we could support school curricula about social class, we might discuss the full complexity of 'wealth' within the parameters of our children's educational lives. Out of these lesson plans, we might talk more about what society values - and whether it rewards the right things.