Below is an excellent snippit from today’s Guardian: Education. Mary O’Hara describes her path to Cambridge as the first person in her family to continue schooling past age 16, let alone attend a university.
I remember one day, in my first year, walking through college when another student said to my friend: “Why is she here? It’s not like her father was here.” My friend looked at me, looked back at him, and said: “Because she earned it.” It was a defining moment.
(On a related note, one of the English slang words I’ve learned from undergrads is “rah,” which stands for “rich asshole.”)
Filed under: Expatriate Life, Student Life |
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Flip Tomato
I'm a postgraduate, expatriate physics student. RSS Feed.
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Rah, see also: Hooray Henry.
The Brit’s obsession with class, entitlement and victimhood, together with the view, held by all mainstream political parties, that the primary purpose of education is to change society, rather than to enlighten individuals, make for a longstanding and rather unpleasant debate focusing on the socio-economic background of students at the UK’s ‘premier’ universities. Trust me Flip, you don’t want to go there. Just leave them to get on with it. (Though it is interesting to compare the proportions of state-educated undergraduates at Cambridge in, shall we say, 1970, 1986 (like the lady up the grauniad) and the present day). On another tack entirely - Rah as an acronym hardly stands up. Asshole, as opposed to arsehole, is not a UK term of disapprobation; I reckon its onomatpoeia, plain and simple.
Yes — I certainly don’t feel qualified to say anything about the concept of `class’ in the UK, but I find it to be an absolute fascinating cultural feature. Again, there are moral/social judgements that one can attach to one’s observations — but that’s not my place as an outsider.
I also didn’t get the sense that `rah’ (if that’s the appropriate spelling?) was actually an acronym, but the undergrads assured me that this is what rah “stood for” all the same. But again, the depth of detail to which an English student can describe what `rah’ means has been really fascinating.