“I’ve been disheartened to discover the extent to which, in a mixed environment, the children themselves seem to self-segregate by socioeconomic status. Even at a young age, the fields of reference between the haves and have-nots are apparently too different. Conversely, children from similar backgrounds, even similarly employed parents, somehow sniff one another out.”
-Lucinda Rosenfeld (Jan 17, 2017)
Lucinda Rosenfeld, a writer whose snobbish nature is paralleled only by her inability to write an interesting article, wrote an article titled “Notes on the Upper Muddle” in which she talks about children’s natural attraction to those of the same socioeconomic class. She was brought up in the upper-class and hung out with those in the same class, despite the fact she had no idea she was in the upper-class. This seems to roughly support her conclusion that classes will hang out with the same class no matter what, but this was because she was in a private school. When she was in a public school, she hung out with those in the lower and middle classes. She hung out with the people around her.
Later on in her life, she was shocked that her child in kindergarten happened to become friends with someone whose parents also worked in book publishing. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
I hope you understood that my statement was completely sarcastic. To base a two and a half page document on groundless ‘evidence’ is a waste of both the writer’s time and my time as the reader. Not only was most of the article pointless information winding off into inconsequential directions with no meaningful result, but her conclusion brings up an issue that none of her evidence supported.
“For if there’s one taboo subject left in the United States, it may be the existence of a class system as closed and inflexible as the one my husband left across the Atlantic.”
What does this have to do with the original argument? Not once does she say that she was locked into a specific class due to her birth. While she did start off in the upper-class and stay in that class, she only has her life as an example. When you start in the upper-class, it’s pretty hard to rise up and you have a cushion to prevent you from falling down, so she is a terrible example of inflexible classes. If she was a middle-class or lower-class citizen who worked hard and was unable to climb in society, then it would slightly support her case. She needs a much larger sample size of people in varying social ranks before she can arrive at a sound conclusion. Forcing the reader to analyze her argument to find any sort of information regarding her conclusion is another example of the irrelevance of this article.
This article is a document that I can only classify as insignificant drivel. The only thing I found more difficult than suffering through reading this was having to write something about it.
Release the Kraken 