Where do I begin....

Class is a funny thing isn't it?

When you are at school you know where you are in the pecking order, I think, or does everyone think they are middle-class?

I came from a upper working class / lower middle class household, and I had friends who were lower class than we were, and friends who were higher class, but I mixed with them all and got on great with mostly everyone.

Once at Primary school, we had a student, and during the course of a lesson she started to talk about rent. I have no idea what the lesson was on, but this statement stuck in my mind and stayed there for ever. "Some people don't even own their own houses, they live in something called 'a council house'".

Now I was by no means the only child in that class who lived in a Council house, but as I looked around, affronted by her words, no one else seemed to react. She was speaking about Council Houses as though they were something dragged out of the dark ages. What she thought she was telling us is beyond me, but that comment stuck. Some people thought there was something wrong with Council Houses.

I came across the same attitude while I trained to be a teacher. Discussing the problems we would come across in classrooms. "Children from Council Houses, are less likely to be able, and in most cases will be distruptive, and will not achieve". How glad I was for my voice, I stood up and spoke out for all those children from Council Houses who wouldn't achieve. I was one of them. I achieved. This was my Post Graduate Course - Of course I had achieved.

As I have grown older, and not necessarily wiser, I have begun to recognise the class differences which make people make these generalisations. However it is not the house they come from which makes these differences, it is the HOME they come from.

People from homes where they are loved and cared for; given hopes and aspirations grown up to be good humans.

People from homes, where little is expected of them, fighting and anger the norm, grow up to fight and be angry.

People who grow up with money, but with anger and hatred inside, waste the benefit they have which they could pass on.

People who grow up with no money but plenty of love, grow up to love and be loved, and become successful good people because of that.

Thanks Mum!