This is the conclusion to The Modern College Woman’s series on social class. Be sure to read the previous installments:
- The Modern College Woman: Let’s Talk About Social Class
- Are You Snobby, Trashy, or Ladylike? Labeling Women in Different Social Classes
- Is the American Dream a Necessary Myth?
I always feel kind of guilty when the students I tutor start their unit on money. It seems to me that it would be nice to go through life blissfully unaware of the difference between a penny and a quarter. Perhaps if Americans thought less about the value of money, we wouldn’t have such polarized social classes.
On the other side of the coin, however, is the ability to see the value behind something rather than just its superficial qualities. A student just learning about money will sometimes use the size or the color of a coin to determine its worth, when these characteristics have nothing to do with the coin’s value.
I’ve been thinking a lot about diversity of all types this week. As much as it sucks to introduce a form of materialism into the life of a child, learning about the differences in money is essential to functioning in society. After all, the use of money depends on the ideals of the person in possession of it– and can be used to improve society.
Ignorance can only be bliss for so long…
Similarly, it is difficult to introduce differences into a community. What if the difference is ultimately divisive? However, if you don’t point out the depth of difference, people are judged on color and size, and that’s just wrong.
Diversity is a currency that affects our whole community’s value. The more we accept our differences, the more faith is placed in our currency and the better the state of our “economy” as a sense of belonging. Because at the end of the day we’re NOT coins, and learning about our differences does not create a hierarchy of worth. In the words of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., people should be judged as individuals by the “content of their character.”
Abraham Lincoln said that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” No matter how many individuals are able to achieve prosperity, the cohesion of America—a unity exemplified by our most basic constitutional convictions—is affected by the state of social class.’
My close friend, a junior at Bowdoin writes, “Idealistically I am the poster child of the American Dream. I come from extreme poverty, where I am the first person in my family to graduate high school, and I now am attending a very prestigious college and excelling.”
However, she recognizes that society doesn’t improve solely on the basis of individuals serving as exceptions to the rarity of drastic social mobility, “…my American Dream is not about me. It encompasses my family, my community, my people. Even though I am now in a position of extreme privilege to which I am very grateful, I will not have achieved much in life until poverty in the US is a thing of past.”
To set our sights on completely eliminating the lower social classes in America is to accept that we may never “get there.” But perhaps this collective dream is just as necessary as the individual dreams of any aspiring rock star, Olympian, or astronaut.
“I know that luck and hard work brought me to Bowdoin, and that I could have easily become another statistic. However, I am not a dreamer. I know very well that ending poverty is impossible, so in that sense I accept that I will never achieve the American Dream.”
We live in a complicated world, and social class is just another force that threatens to confound our ability to relate to one another. Realistically, social class will never be eliminated, which is why we have to reach across class barriers. Understanding is the new gold standard!