Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 25. No. 11. 1962

Doubts

Doubts

Dr Hey answered questions in some of which doubt was expressed whether people who originate in the lower-classes are permanently alienated from their background by education. Examples were brought forward to show that the values of the middle-classes, as expressed in the "bourgeois" education system, were taken up in preference to earlier values and predominated over these earlier values. Educated members of the lower-classes did not return to their earlier allegiances. They married outside their early background, and assumed the values of the class they had now entered.

Without their own intelligentsia, the capacity of the working classes to organise themselves politically would be cut drastically, said one questioner. Perhaps this is the reason for the degeneration of the Labour Party, he wondered. Dr Hey agreed to the extent that the political allegiance of the working classes would probably be divided amongst political parties not emanating from themselves as a group.