{"id":1858,"date":"2015-04-28T19:32:14","date_gmt":"2015-04-29T01:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=1858"},"modified":"2016-08-16T09:49:14","modified_gmt":"2016-08-16T15:49:14","slug":"a-probably-blindingly-obvious-observation-about-education-class-and-cohorts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/04\/a-probably-blindingly-obvious-observation-about-education-class-and-cohorts.html","title":{"rendered":"A (probably blindingly obvious) observation about education, class, and cohorts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I keep dribbling out observations from the book I\u2019m reading, Robert Putnam\u2019s Our Kids. \u00a0<\/em>Here\u2019s another one:<\/p>\n

One of Putnam\u2019s key points is that in the last two generations there\u2019s been a significant divergence in the family lives of the college-educated\/middle-class and the high school-educated\/working-class. \u00a0The former are more likely to attend church, have stable marriages (or any marriage at all), read to their children, encourage them to participate in after-school activities, have high expectations for their academic success, etc. \u2014 and he illustrates by means of what he calls \u201cscissors graphs\u201d the divergence since the 70s or 80s.<\/p>\n

I was talking about this with my husband on our after-dinner walk and this was his observation:<\/p>\n

On my father\u2019s side, his parents were high school graduates. \u00a0Grandpa worked at the Gates Rubber Plant (and avoided the draft because his job was crucial to the war effort), and, having come from farm families but settling in the Denver area, they saved enough to buy enough acreage to have, basically, a hobby farm, with livestock and chickens for egg money; they sent their kids to Catholic schools, and they participated in 4H. \u00a0As the suburbs moved in, they later developed the land into houses, which gave them quite a healthy nest egg for retirement. \u00a0Now, neither of them were college-educated, but they were very literate. \u00a0After they retired, he spent some time in the summer, for many summers, with a dinosaur dig in South Dakota. \u00a0Of their five children \u2014 my dad and his siblings \u2014 3 (or 4, I\u2019m not sure about Uncle Soren) went to college, with some parental assistance but mostly working their way through.<\/p>\n

On my mother\u2019s side, again high school graduates only. \u00a0YaYa was a sales clerk at a department store after the kids were grown, and Papou, who came over from Greece immediately upon graduating high school there, was a barber first, then a life insurance salesman (I believe the traditional door-to-door selling type). \u00a0I don\u2019t recall the house being particularly full of books, but there\u2019s a photograph of Papou as a young man, in a play in community theatre, and for many years, he played the violin in the St. Louis Philharmonic<\/a>, a all-volunteer but high-calibre orchestra. \u00a0Of their five children, three graduated\u00a0college \u2014 my uncle, and two of my aunts who became schoolteachers, in part because my grandfather, being from the Old Country, was limited in the number of occupations he was willing to support his daughters undertaking. \u00a0(My mom, the oldest, went to nursing school, which at the time was more of an earn-your-way apprenticeship, and afterwards helped my youngest aunt with tuition money; and the second-youngest\u00a0of the five started but didn\u2019t finish as she dropped out to get married.)<\/p>\n

(For a chronological reference point, both my parents were born in 1939.)<\/p>\n

In other words, in the generation prior to the widespread availability of college, there were plenty of families with mindsets and attitudes and behaviors that we now associate with the college-educated, even though they never set foot on a college campus \u2014 and, let\u2019s face it, with the intelligence that would have taken them to college, in difference circumstances. \u00a0But that cohort, once college became more accessible, sent their own children to college, and the era, if you will, in which there were an appreciable number of intelligent, but non-college-educated, blue-collar workers, was, to a large degree, over.<\/p>\n

Putnam says that in the past generation or two there\u2019s been a significant widening of the geographical divide between rich and poor, between the college- and the high school-educated. \u00a0But to take this a step further, I suspect that another key change in America since the 50s, say, is that there\u2019s been a significant narrowing of what it means to be working-class\/non-college-educated.<\/p>\n

I know, this point has probably been made by many others, and more articulately than in this little post, but it\u2019s something to chew on, and perhaps you, readers, have similar stories to share.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I keep dribbling out observations from the book I\u2019m reading, Robert Putnam\u2019s Our Kids. \u00a0Here\u2019s another one: One of Putnam\u2019s key points is that in the last two generations there\u2019s been a significant divergence in the family lives of the college-educated\/middle-class and the high school-educated\/working-class. \u00a0The former are more likely to attend church, have stable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[450],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actuarial"],"yoast_head":"\nA (probably blindingly obvious) observation about education, class, and cohorts<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I keep dribbling out observations from the book I'm reading, Robert Putnam's Our Kids. \u00a0Here's another one: One of 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