ABSTRACT
In the last chapter we presented the home background against which the children were born. Our suggestion was that where-as the middle-class parent was quietly and justifiably confident about handing on an educational inheritance to his children, the parent of the successful working-class child was more often nervous and anxious to break through and snatch grammar school education for his children. Of course this is only a rough attempt to catch a central thread; the full picture was more elusive than that. But at its centre was the working-class home in which frustration, drive, ambition, was such as to impel even the modestly-gifted child through all the difficulties of primary and grammar school into the Middle-class’ invitations of college, university and the professional career.
