Some Differences between Middle-Class and Working-Class Grammar School Boys in Their Attitudes towards Education

Abstract

individual ambition and success. In Britain there is a large scale, institutionalized selection of young working-class candidates for entrance into the middle-class. The examination which determines who will have a grammar school education, acts like a springboard that thrusts eleven-year-old workingclass children into schools with a niiddle-class ethos, where, in the company of middle-class children, they become educated for a middle-class life. According to some authors, middle-class and working-class children have different attitudes towards learning and education. The question to be examined in this paper is whether such differences can be found between gramrnar school pupils who come from middle-class, and those who come from working-class homes.