Missing: A Sociology of Educating the Middle Class

Abstract

Writing over 20 years ago, Patrick Hutber identified the 1970s as ‘a time of crisis for the middle classes, who are subjected to unprecedented pressures and … unprecedented denigration’ (1976: ix). His book The Decline and Fall of the Middle Class and How It Can Fight Back argues that the middle-class has not only sacrificed the economic basis for its continued prosperity, it has also lost the battle of ideas. Crippled by a selfinflicted drive for egalitarianism and a related ‘middle class sense of guilt’, Hutber claims that ‘never has a section of society more enthusiastically co-operated in its own euthanasia’.