Richard Hoggart's Scholarship Boy

The modern Scholarship Boy: betrayal or belonging?

Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy is a classic account of twentieth-century western culture which portrays the struggle of 1950s working class individuals to pursue higher positions in society through academia. Melissa Gregg, author of Cultural Studies' Affective Voices takes Hoggart's book as an illustration as how one's family and background can restrict upward mobility through binds of loyalty and values. Hoggart constructs an example of the student who transitions into academia from a working-class background through the figure of the Scholarship Boy, which Gregg takes as an illustration of the "unforgiving double bind" a student experiences; a tension between their working-class origins and higher education based on loyalty (43). I will argue, however, that Gregg's proposal of a "kind of betrayal" that "always haunt[s]" (43) the class-climbing student today ignores the currently shifting roles of the family and community, does not take into account the recent rise of individualism and relies heavily on an outdated concept of Ð''class'. Sole loyalties to the family, heritage and community, I argue, have been recently replaced with a loyalty to the self, where a student frees themselves to construct an identity separate from their family. Furthermore, instead of Gregg's proposal that Richard Hoggart's Scholarship Boy illustrates issues of loyalty, I argue that its relevance for today lies in the issues of transition and belonging for the student who lacks the cultural capital needed to succeed in academia.

The dramatic shift in the structure and role of the home in the past decade has predominantly shown a trend towards individuals forming separate identities and relationships outside the context of the family. From the predominance of the nuclear, self-supportive family unit of the past to the fragmented nature of many families today, these changes have changed the need and importance of the family; now often inferior to the support given to relationships offered outside the home. Deborah Chambers in her recently published book New Social Ties comments that the vacuum left by the fading family has been replaced by bonds of friendship (19). Now, she argues, people "would be more likely to describe themselves by their personal relationships rather than by their heritage or the old community traditions of class" (Chambers 21). The family today, then, has been overshadowed by what lies outside of it, and both the aspirations to succeed in academia and the desire to invest in relationships outside the family have grown alongside the rise of individualism. Unlike Hoggart's community-orientated society, the world today has been impacted by factors such as globalisation, escalating divorce rates and increased spatial and social mobility that have encouraged individualism and independence (Chambers 1). Spatial and social mobility in particular have aided the shift away from the family and the growth in the favouring of friendship outside of it. No longer bound to a community to rely on neighbours and family members, individuals are freer to travel longer distances today to invest in relationships of their choice.

Despite today's increased emphasis on friendship, Chambers argues that today's society encourages a form of "anonymous, capitalist, and competitive individualism" (19). The student today, then, is more likely not to find themselves caught up in a double bind of loyalty between home and higher education, but if any Ð'- between themselves and others (Damrosch 6). On one hand, the student desperately desires belonging and friendship but is simultaneously pushed into aggressive and competitive individualism through institutions like the university (Damrosch 14). Indeed however, the level of tension between independence and interdependence depends on the student's learning environments and training and is not applicable to every student today. Perhaps more widely applicable is the simple proposition that with the centrality of the family decreasing, a student's desire to belong is still strong and their desire will transcend issues of competitiveness. Because of the sheer potency of the individual's desire to belong, regardless of how much society stresses individualism and competitiveness, today's student are finding ways to belong to multiple groups (Chambers 27) and do not need to Ð''leave' mentally and emotionally as characterised by Hoggart's Scholarship Boy. (Hoggart 300) Because of the breakdown of Ð''class' and the weight now put on individualism, the student is seen as separate to their family and is thus less attached to it. The use of new media like the internet and the mobile phone and websites such as My Space have increased the attention on the individual and what they can offer in isolation to their family class, heritage and relations. Instead, the emphasis is on their chosen "Top 10 Friends" who become markers of identity and belonging. Hoggart's Scholarship Boy was characterised by his unease and discomfort in his new arena of academia and was described as "anxious and uprooted" (300), "no longer really belong[ing] to any group" (292). Hoggart illustrates the isolation of the Scholarship Boy by depicting him as "separated from the boys' groups outside the homeÐ'... being no longer a full member of the gang." (295) The modern Scholarship Boy might be today characterised by his fluidity and flexibility in Ð''fitting in' to his new environment and relationships based solely on his own individuality which is completely unrelated to his background or home environment. His pursuit of academia is also accompanied by his pursuit of belonging, which through the institute of the university; he adapts and conforms to find a place. With students today increasingly detached from their origins and identifying more strongly with friendships outside the family, the individual has been empowered by choice and free from the chains of Ð''class' (Chambers 30).

Melissa Gregg's proposition that class-climbing students are haunted by a sense of family betrayal overestimates the power and restrictive nature of class today and ignores how Ð''class' and its system of Ð''sorting' has changed today (Tilly 71-5). Recently the term Ð''class' has become an unpopular word due to a social shift favouring equality and diversity, with an increase in inclusive access particularly in areas of education. The access to information on the internet has pulled Ð''classes' of people tighter together through widespread, equal-footing access