ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how discourses have historically influenced working class and other relationships with higher education. It utilises Michel Foucault’s perspective of ‘historicity’ to demonstrate that truth and reality are contingent and ephemeral. Dominant truths would often influence how people perceived and responded to their own social realities, particularly in relation to a sense of educational entitlement. The inconsistency between these truths is submerged however because the discourses were being used by all sectors of society. Truth, then, is a construction to suit the dominant power holders. The stories from Wyrevale and Portside were about two kinds of working class experiences; those who obtained apprenticeships and relatively stable work patterns and those whose fragmented employment relied entirely on unskilled work. The stories of the younger Loamshire women revealed yet another mixture of intergenerational realities amidst very different cultures and with their own dominant discourses.
