Newly Educated akin to Nouveau Riche?

[Hunter]

Do you think there is something among the newly educated that is similar to what is referred to as new money?

[Rosie_0801]

Maybe a little something like "new recruit syndrome?"

[zarabellesmom]

Oooh, this could be fun. Neither of my parents finished a baccalaureate. My mother did an associate degree in accounting and my dad joined the military and trained in maintenance. I have a baccalaureate degree and graduated with honors. I'm not sure if this qualifies me to comment in this thread but I'm curious to see where it goes. Both of my husband's parents have undergraduate degrees. He and his two brothers are all degreed (my husband as a chemist and engineer, middle brother an engineer, and youngest a very recently graduated seminarian). We all have children and expect they will go on to college for a baccalaureate as a minimum.

 

ETA: While neither of my parents were degreed, the expectation was always that I would be.

Edited February 7, 2016 by ZaraBellesMom

[ReadingMama1214]

I'm interested in seeing how this discussion goes as well. Not sure if I'd qualify as newly educated either. My mom and her siblings all dropped out of high school and received GEDs. My mom got her associates degree at 27 and my aunt received hers at 30 and is working towards her BA in nursing.

 

My husband and I both have undergraduate degrees and I am pursuing my masters. I desire for my kids to have a strong academic foundation, but do not think they necessarily need a degree to be successful. We will obviously act as if they are pursuing college, but if they decide not to and have a solid plan, I will support them.

[Hunter]

If you are not talking about social class, then I'm not sure how newly educated could be like the nouveau riche. The "newly educated" would know the same things as the "old" educated. The nouveau riche are "nouveau riche" because they don't how to be rich. Does that make sense?

Do the newly educated know the same things as the old educated? Do they have the same context to understand the bits and pieces they learn from a book or course? Do they do the same things with these bits and pieces?

[Rosie_0801]

Do the newly educated know the same things as the old educated? Do they have the same context to understand the bits and pieces they learn from a book or course? Do they do the same things with these bits and pieces?

 

Nope.

 

 

We only need to read through Ester Maria's old posts, or, rather, people disagreeing with Ester Maria's old posts to see that. :)

[Carol in Cal.]

Then there is the very pregnant term 'sophomoric'.

[FO4UR]

I don;t know what the question means, Hunter! Do you mean that people who really did pull themselves up by the bootstraps and gain an education are looked down upon by those who have had access to good educations for generations ?>

 

I don't think that's what she's asking.

 

Do people who have the benefit of Mom & Dad chatting about academic things, chatting about politics in a logical fashion, enjoying literature/art/music in the evenings at home...do those kids have a difference about them not attainable by those who are well-educated, but not by their parents?

 

Of course, there is a difference.  Is that difference similar to "New Money?"

 

Nah...I think New Money can be lost.  New Education is generally a hungered for, fought for, and closely held treasure. 

[Hunter]

I mean it all. Anything that goes along with new money that might have a comparison among the newly educated.

 

I'm not saying old money is superior to new money or that multi-generation educations are better than new ones. Fresh blood and ideas are stimulating to any subculture.

 

BUT...are there pitfalls that can be avoided or toned down, if they are identified and acknowledged. Can mistakes be avoided by noticing the mistakes of others.

 

And is there any such thing at all? Or does it matter at all? Is it only something the multi-generationalists like to emphasize as a form of exclusion?

[Hunter]

Nah...I think New Money can be lost. New Education is generally a hungered for, fought for, and closely held treasure.

Can New Education be lost?

[smfmommy]

In a way I am newly educated but in a way not.  My parents got their Masters in Counseling together when I was in high school.  My mother went on to get her Masters in Nursing 10 years later.  I have a BS in Chemistry.  But my parents didn't read much (that I saw and certainly not classics).  We didn't listen to classical music or have discussions at the dinner table.  The TV was on most evenings all evening.  They accepted the status quo in almost everything (most notably in medicine which I think has done them more harm than good).

 

I question everything.  We have lots of discussions with our children, we read aloud, we listen to all types of music, etc, etc.  I think my children will be the newly educated.  I think they could have an intelligent conversation with the "old educated" but their knowledge base is skewed to the modern so it would be obvious that they are different.  Yet they find the conversations of many of their peers shallow and frustrating even when discussing pop culture.  They just look at things differently (although I acknowledge that it might be more personality than education).

 

I don't think the new education can be lost by that person but it can be failed to be passed on to the next generation.

[Guest]

This is something I've thought a lot about. Neither of my parents have a degree; dad barely finished high school and mom has some college classes. Neither of their parents went to college and none of their parents went to college and so on. Everyone has been solidly low working class...except my dad who has worked his way up to middle upper class as defined by charts and graphs, not by actual lifestyle. And definitely not upper percentage of the upper class.

And now I've got a bee in my bonnet to graduate college around the time we will be starting homeschooling high school. And I have a big inkling that the education I will get will affect DS's high school. And I hope that what I will be studying will get me the job that will allow me to splurge even more on DS going to college and his kids being well educated.

My mom homeschooled me and looking back, I can definitely see where my education would have been SO MUCH BETTER if she herself had gone to college. Even if she didn't know the material, I think she might have had the ability to and curiosity to research things and discover....rather than just handing me one book.

[Arcadia]

Nouveau riche does carry a bad connotation. Are you referring to wealth of more money in comparison to weath of more knowledge? Or whether newly educated carries the same bad connotation?

 

In my culture there is also a cultural knowledge (jokingly called 5000 years of history and culture) that is past down each generation. The classics, calligraphy, art, martial arts...so each generation is suppose to be well educated whether the child goes to school and gets that paper qualification. The imperial exams has been in existence for centuries.

[Hunter]

Yes, Nouveau Riche is often used as a deragatory term. Does that mean it is not real? Does that mean those new to money cannot learn from listening and reading what it said about it? How does a newly rich person best deal with this term being lobbed at them as an insult? In an attempt to not have this term lobbed at them, might they go to other extremes that are disempowering?

 

Can any of the above questions be applied to the newly educated?

Edited February 7, 2016 by Hunter

[Arcadia]

Humilty. One can be great and yet humble.

 

Doesn't matter whether it is money, paper qualifications, aptitudes, abilities.

 

It is not about downplaying one's strength but about not throwing it at people's face.

 

For example, someone can spend a few hundreds on a spa day but that person need not tell everyone she has money to throw on a spa day.

 

I see the same in some people who are first generation PhD holders. They have to sign off every informal email and letter with Dr. their firstname their lastname.

 

This article would be interesting. Its on a few websites. I link to the one on BBC website

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20150219-the-latest-chinese-status-symbol

[FO4UR]

Can New Education be lost?

 

Not within that person, I don't think.  It can fail to be passed on.

 

Or, a person can be so blinded with arrogance that ...well...yeah, it can be lost. 

[Arcadia]

That article was interesting. Thanks for sharing. Is it really necessary to throw away one's own culture like that?

Nope. However there is a generation of chinese that was born during the communist regime and the finesse of the older generation was lost. The "joke" is that it is the overseas chinese that kept the "old" culture of tea ceremony and other etiquette related stuff.

[Hunter]

Nope. However there is a generation of chinese that was born during the communist regime and the finesse of the older generation was lost. The "joke" is that it is the overseas chinese that kept the "old" culture of tea ceremony and other etiquette related stuff.

Was the finesse the culture of everyone, or just the ruling minority? Did the majority culture become more prevalent? Was the finesse, at least some of it, borrowed Western ideas?

Edited February 7, 2016 by Hunter

[Targhee]

Can New Education be lost?

Yes, and squandered. At least when I think of an education as a pursuit of truth. I realize an education facilitates employment, but that is not its primary purpose as I see it. An education is to add to human experience, our understanding of what is real and true.

 

So, what do you do with your education? Sit on it like a miserly Scrooge, which I would argue is as good as losing it? Burn through it for self-indulgence only? Or do you hold on, build dividends and interest by investing it wisely and working it? Do you engage in discussion, deep contemplation? Are you active in an academic community? Do you teach or mentor? Do you continue as a student or mentee? Do you apply your education to your life (not your "job") to make it more genuine?

[Arcadia]

Was the finesse the culture of everyone, or just the ruling minority? Did the majority culture become more prevalent? Was the finesse, at least some of it, borrowed Western ideas?

The ruling minority was the emperor. I was not referring to that kind of finesse. I was referring into the general finesse that was a long legacy of culture way before the last emperor. It is not western style social etiquette.

 

Chinese feudal system would be similar to European feudal system. Western ideas are kind of hard to define because other than democracy/voting, I can't think of anything that is western/european started. Capitalist, socialism has been everywhere in the world for ages.

[Arcadia]

So, were the Chinese communists of previous generations so successful at erasing all that stuff associated with the nobility from the public mind that the younger generation of rich Chinese, who are decidedly not growing up in a classless society or one moving in that direction, have to get that stuff from other countries? Or is bringing that stuff back still taboo but similar stuff from the West is OK?

A lot of the "stuff" went underground. However the chinese described in the BBC article do have some learning to do. For example my kids are growing up in California. They have been exposed to our extended families traditional etiquette/customs as well as also some british customs that my parents generation pick up from colonial days. We want our kids to be equally comfortable in eastern, western and multicultural settings, to be able to gauge the social setting ans behave/adapt appropriately.

 

Communism in China was not classless. There is still the ruling communist party.

[wendyroo]

Let me start with an anecdote...

It was my first semester at MIT and I was taking a class on Roman History.  A new friend of mine, Kate, who lived on my floor of the dorm was also taking the class.  Neither of us had bought all of the books listed on the syllabus, and instead were checking them out of the library to read.  One of the assigned books was Livy's The History of Rome and I was having a hard time finding a copy available at the library.  I asked Kate if she had been able to check out a copy and she matter of factly said yes, that she never had a problem with that because it was rare for anyone to check out the Latin versions so she just read those. 

 

It turns out that Kate was old educated.  She came from a long line of PhDs and she had been immersed in classical studies from the time she was a tot.  Not in a hot housing way with flash cards or curricula, but simply in the air she breathed from the time she was born.

 

I, on the other hand, was new educated.  My parents valued education, I was very smart, I got into MIT, but collegiate blood did not run in my veins as it did in Kate's.  My parents had not gone to college and simply did not have mastery of any body of academic knowledge in which they could immerse me and my brother.  I entered college with high test scores, a quick mind and a lot of memorized facts, but without the benefits of insight, connections or rudimentary knowledge of how to navigate an institute of higher learning.

 

Kate was old educated, I was new educated, and my kids?  They are somewhere in between.  In my mind, there can be many different forms of old education.  Kate came from a classically educated line.  I have heard of families that live and breathe and pass down languages to their kids or musicality or medicine, etc.  DH and I come from families with a STEM emphasis (I have a number of aunts and uncles with STEM degrees and that is the field my father ended up in even though he was never formally educated) and that is what we are passing down to our kids.  

 

Math and science and problem solving are the lenses through which we see the world and the "air" our kids are breathing all day every day.  They will never be old educated, but DH and I hope that by homeschooling them* and really soaking them in the knowledge we have fought for (and our parents fought to give us) there is a good chance our grandchildren might be.

 

Wendy

 

*In my experience it is really hard to find an old education in a Department of Education.  There are, of course, diamonds in the rough, but in all our years in the public schools, DH and I only rarely had a teacher who was truly a master of their academic field.  Most of our time in public school was spent breathing in the air of mediocrity and anti-intellectualism.

[Arcadia]

The emperor, but also the nobility, no? Hunter was, I think, asking where the servant class fit into all of this.

There are two types of servants in feudal China. Those who are paid and those who are bought. How educated they are depend on the family they work for.

[Farrar]

In Imperial China, who was eligible to take the civil service exam? No, actually, who was able to take them in practice? 

 

The only people who could take them were people who had time to study for them for years without taking other work and then the means to travel to take them. In other words, while there was this Chinese myth of upward mobility, it was basically a myth. There was a common conception of the poorer worker who works hard to help his son take the exams, the son becomes an official, his son becomes an official, but by the grandson, he is lazy and fails the exams, his son in turn is poor and the cycle can start anew. But, like I said, mostly a myth, a but like the Chinese Horatio Alger.

[Farrar]

I don't have a huge amount of experience with this. My father was a first generation college student - sports scholarship. But he never finished college. He didn't have education as a hunger. His parents didn't value it specifically (they were anti-intellectual exactly either... they mostly just valued that he was good at playing ball). My mother was definitely not first generation college.

 

But I think there can be a culture clash between first generation college people and the rest of their families - education can change your values, your political and religious beliefs, how you want to parent your kids, who you end up marrying, what sort of work you do, where you end up living. It can really separate a person from their parents and uncles and aunts and potentially their siblings as well if they didn't also achieve much education. But that's radically different from "new money." New money means misusing your money to some extent or making bad decisions with it. I don't know how you make bad decisions with your education. I mean, maybe you could have done more with a college degree and a bunch of connections and a head start in your education, but you're still better off with the education. So I don't think the comparison holds.

[Farrar]

Does it? I have no experience with this myself :) but I thought "new money" referred to people who were previously much less moneyed and who suddenly became rich — they have the money, so they now belong to the upper class, but they don't have the same class background, so they aren't really part of the whole upper class in terms of culture. They're not country club material because they don't have the right background, in other words. I could see something similar applying to people who were, let's say, the first in their family to attend university. 

 

I think of it as being derogatory - in part for people being "not good enough for us old money folk" like you're saying but also for being people with bad taste, who are putting on airs, and who are misusing or wasting their money in some way or another because they don't know how to do it "right" like the old money people supposedly do.

 

I don't know... it's tricky because while money can be equal (two people can have approximately the same net worth, after all), education can't be, not in the same way. Even two people who have an "Ivy League education" will have gotten radically different educations. Even in the same course of study, people are taking something different away, in part based on what they knew from before. It's just harder to compare.

[Farrar]

That's interesting. I never thought of it in terms of squandering money or not knowing how to handle it. I thought of it as pretty much exclusively cultural. 

 

I think the most stereotypical example is a new movie star or sports star who immediately goes out and gets a super flashy car and a giant mansion and fills it with complete junk - toys, art, whatever.

[Farrar]

Yep, the term makes me think of signifiers - new money buys the wrong signifiers, according to old money, so instead of signifying success they signify lack of class.

 

I don't believe any of this, btw.  But that's my understanding of 'nouveau riche' and maybe why I don't understand the original question.

 

Yes. I don't mean to say that those are the "wrong" things to buy in actuality. More that they're disapproved of by the old rich. But also that sometimes when you get money fast you genuinely don't know how to invest it and save it appropriately - that isn't handed down to you by your parents. So it makes sense that not all your decisions would be smart. So then you have money, but you're still disadvantaged.

 

I don't know how education can compare exactly. Can you be educated and still be disadvantaged? I mean, sure, you're lacking the connections of being "old education" I suppose. But it's different from misusing your education as a result.

[wendyroo]

I don't know how education can compare exactly. Can you be educated and still be disadvantaged? I mean, sure, you're lacking the connections of being "old education" I suppose. But it's different from misusing your education as a result.

 

I can think of at least one way that a new education college graduate is disadvantaged.

 

I would think the new educated are more likely to graduate drowning in student debt.  Their parents probably can't help them as much with tuition, they take longer to graduate and choose professions with lower salaries.

 

So, if Sibling 1 follows in his parents' footsteps and gets a solid, blue collar job he or she could have an advantage over Sibling 2 who attempts college but either lacks the resources to graduate or graduates with more student debt then he or she could pay off in a lifetime.

 

That could be seen as misuse of an education such that it disadvantages the educatee.

 

Wendy

[Farrar]

I can think of at least one way that a new education college graduate is disadvantaged.

 

I would think the new educated are more likely to graduate drowning in student debt.  Their parents probably can't help them as much with tuition, they take longer to graduate and choose professions with lower salaries.

 

So, if Sibling 1 follows in his parents' footsteps and gets a solid, blue collar job he or she could have an advantage over Sibling 2 who attempts college but either lacks the resources to graduate or graduates with more student debt then he or she could pay off in a lifetime.

 

That could be seen as misuse of an education such that it disadvantages the educatee.

 

Wendy

 

But isn't this different than the education itself being the disadvantage? I guess that's where I get hung up. I can think of other things like that... but it feels to me like the knowledge and thinking tools are not disadvantaging the person - the societal systems through which they acquired them are. But maybe you can't separate them.

[tm919]

Interesting discussion... my first thought was that if someone is clearly "newly educated" in the derogatory way that "nouveau riche" is meant,  they would choose to flaunt all the wrong things about their education (e.g., that they've read "hard" books not that they can really think critically about them). But if they really did that, then they aren't educated at all.

 

I think it's possible that coming to certain things as a young child creates a different impression. My first memory of several Beethoven pieces was hearing them at Tanglewood as a child, with the rain coming down in SHEETS outside the shed... My husband's first real memory of those pieces was in a library, after attending a lecture in which their themes were identified and analyzed. I don't "know" anything about those pieces that he doesn't (probably I know less), but I "take them for granted" in a way he doesn't.

[Farrar]

Okay, I wanted to go back and read Hunter's questions... and this one was more interesting to me in that I felt like I understood it better.

 

Do the newly educated know the same things as the old educated? Do they have the same context to understand the bits and pieces they learn from a book or course? Do they do the same things with these bits and pieces?

 

I think it's all relative. I mean, if you're from a family of educated engineers you're going to have a different context than a family of educated artists or educated humanities people or educated people in a variety of fields. And then educated and urban is going to look different than suburban or rural. Educated and rich is going to look different from educated and poor. Educated has no race or ethnicity or gender but all those things affect how we take in information and what context we can give it. And then there's the fact that sometimes the outsider status gives people different take - sometimes a more brilliant one. So uneducated families provide a context, but it's just a different one - and I would argue it's not superior or inferior per se.

 

Education builds upon itself and gives itself more and more context in which to fit the bits and pieces. In that sense, anyone has access to the context. But also, the context is potentially different for everyone.

 

This makes me think of Shakespeare in the Bush, which, if you don't know it, is one of those classic essays everyone should read. And while we're not all taking away such radically different meanings from the things we learn about as the author and the Tiv people she shares Hamlet with, we are all taking subtly different things from music, stories, language, etc - no matter if we're old or newly educated.

[Arcadia]

In Imperial China, who was eligible to take the civil service exam? No, actually, who was able to take them in practice?

Actually anyone but the servants even though technically they could if they are not bonded. My grandparents were from rural China and considered poverty but with food and roof. Paternal side is from a fishing village but they aren't fishermen. Maternal side is more inland. Both grandmothers are educated despite poverty.

 

My grandparents left China before World War One. Even when growing up in China they had time to study. Working in the fields wasn't from sunrise to sundown even for the adults.

 

Being the top scholar is about as hard as getting into a top university in any country, but it is still not a myth. Even now getting to the top universities in China is very hard. Same for being the top scholar in India too.

[Tsuga]

Do you think there is something among the newly educated that is similar to what is referred to as new money?

 

No.

 

You can get a massive amount of economic power with zero effort, and that is old money (it is inherited); you can get a lot of economic power without knowing how to use it and that is new money (it is earned or somehow gotten from nothing).

 

The nature of education is such that each of us must work equally hard to earn our own. If someone is newly educated and has less knowledge than someone else, then they are not as educated. It's not that it's "new education", it is literally less education.

 

Though I do think there is such a thing as "imposter syndrome" which makes first-generation literati less confident in their knowledge than those who are from educated families. It's the opposite effect, though. Generally they tend to make less and be less confident, not to use their money brashly and show it off. It works the other way.

 

I am from a family that is from skilled tradespeople, civil servants, music. Few of us have had opportunities for PhDs but we are all very well-read. But I know that my mom always felt intimidated when speaking with doctors and other "educated" people because she "just" had her nursing degree, though she'd read all of Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies. I wondered why.

 

I'm a first-generation college student, as many of my cousins are. I don't show off my degree and I don't brag about it. On the contrary, I used to feel intimidated until I met a lot of people from the Ivies and talked with people from the Ivies who were from my own school. I was shocked to learn that there's only so much time to read and so you really can only get so far ahead. I was also amazed to learn how many people spent so much time learning buzzwords but not analyzing anything.That might be generational too. I don't feel that I lost out in my education at all... but that's not because I'm newly educated. It's because I earned what I got and so did they.

 

 

 

 

Yes, I can't work out how you could use education itself to signify belonging to a particular class or not.

 

Welcome to America:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_03.html

[Hunter]

I think it is possible to waste and misuse both money and knowledge. Defining and judging what is waste and misuse would depend on worldview.

 

Some university courses are specialty knowledge and skills. They are tools. Application of these specialty tools in general situations or to show off one's accomplishments, could be misuse.

 

Knowledge can be powerful. Sometimes newly acquired power can be misused. So can long ago acquired power, but that is often not done by enthusiasm, naivete, or mistake.

 

I have some half-formed thoughts and opinions, but without belonging to a culture or established belief system I have pretty much abandoned any sense of right and wrong. So I'm just kinda non-judgmentally observing some things lately, detached, that gave me some pause.

 

It is Sunday, a good day for one of my questions. I just wanted to hear what people thought.

 

Actually, it is Monday, now. :lol:

[Bluegoat]

All this begs the question — what IS education? There is, of course, not a single definition but many.

 

I was thinking that this might be part of what is different between the newly educated and the more culturally educated.  I think it is really common amongthe newly educated to see education mainly as a means to an end - better security, higher social status, a better job.  I thik there is less sense of it as a cultural heritage or way to understand the world.

 

THat is, education in the larger sense is often seen as a form of technical education in families where it isn't part of their heritage.

 

I'm not convinced though that it tracks on very exactly to level of educational qualification in individuals. 

 

For example, I have a friend who comes from a family where quite a few of his siblings have doctorates, and the others are also well educated at university.  And I think to as individuals many of them have a larger sense of education  But the family culture doesn't come across  that way - previously they have been a business kind of family, very wealthy, but very practical.  On the other hand I have another friend where the family just seems very immersed in an educated culture, even though quite a few do not have university degrees, and many of the ones they have are practical.  They come however from quite a long line of country parsons, and cultural literacy at a high level is just part of their background.

 

I also think that once you go back a few generations it can look a little different as well - university education wasn't so common even among the well-educated.  One of my grandmothers had that kind of education, though she's finished school by 16 and didn't go on.  Men in her social class were more likely to go on to university, but even then it was less common than today.

[Bluegoat]

That's interesting. I never thought of it in terms of squandering money or not knowing how to handle it. I thought of it as pretty much exclusively cultural. 

 

 

I think the most stereotypical example is a new movie star or sports star who immediately goes out and gets a super flashy car and a giant mansion and fills it with complete junk - toys, art, whatever.

 

To me it sounds as if these are mostly the same thing.  The sports guy buys these things because he doesn't have the culture that comes with being old money, so his interests and values aren't the same.

 

It might also lead to him squandering, but not necessarily - people can be new money because they are hard-working and have a good head for making money.

 

Two things come to my mind when thinking about old vs new money.  The first is perhaps a bit old fashioned - bespoke clothes (old) vs designer (new.)  The other is something like the guys from Duck Dynasty - they may be really rich, but they will probably never be culturally upper class, and probably their kids won't either.

Edited February 8, 2016 by Bluegoat

[LostintheCosmos]

Hunter, are you familiar with Earl Shorris? I thought he'd been mentioned on the boards before, but a quick search didn't turn anything up. Seems like it might be the kind of thing you'd find interesting - here's his article on liberal education "as a weapon in the hands of the restless poor."