0151-Girlz: 'A Working Class Education' by Caitlin O'Connor

I seem to have some form of crisis every season. Each time the weather changes, I am susceptible to self-criticism, leading me to doubt myself, become an existentialist and get a fringe. I don’t know whether it’s seasonal affective disorder or if I’m just really dramatic. Whatever it is, it’s a good way to break up the year.

The common theme of these crises is what can be categorised as imposter syndrome: a chronic belief that I am not good enough, that someone is going to call me into a meeting on a Wednesday afternoon and say, “I’m terribly sorry but we seem to have made a mistake. You don’t belong here after all.” I’d nod, shake their hand and say, “I knew it all along. Thank you for your time.”

Though this fraudulence is commonly felt, mine has manifested through my class identity. I started to feel like this when I went to university, moving away to study English Literature and History at the University of Edinburgh. It’s a classic case of feeling like a small fish in a big pond but with a sinister twist: I am a small and nervous working-class fish in an impossibly posh pond. I have a thick Scouse accent and am expected to talk about Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot and Gandhi not only confidently, but slowly and articulately. I am meant to understand and be understood in a system that I still don’t understand. After four years, I really believe that education fails the working class.

No matter how much money is loaned or how many unconditional offers are granted, the structure of the system has not changed. However good natured and progressive accessibility efforts are, they only deflect the responsibility for change away from the gatekeepers of education to individual students. The problem of academia is that it is built from the expectations of the middle classes: they decide what is culturally relevant, highly artistic and historically true. They craft knowledge and teach it to the next generation of politicians, academics and theorists. But more people from different backgrounds are reaching university so academia must change. Accessibility, ambition and achievement have been rephrased as personal successes, the lack of which is not challenged but internalised by students with identities that do not comply with these expectations.

I could only begin to articulate this when I began working on my dissertation, in which I explored the constructions of girlhood in contemporary working-class fiction. While the writing process was horrendous, the period of time I researched my dissertation was the most fulfilled I have been in education. I read books and studies by working-class academics, watched political speeches and talked to lecturers about socialist-feminist theories. In the works of these academics, who write about working-class stories and lives, I found different parts of myself. I studied twentieth-century, working-class creative movements, learning about Orwellian dystopia, Tressell’s realism and Loach’s kitchen-sink dramas. I thought about the Labour Party, taking pride in its radical beginnings and despairing for its move to neoliberalism. And, like a right nerd, I cried reading Beverley Skeggs and Valerie Walkerdine’s studies on working-class girls.

It’s an odd sensation, sitting in a library hundreds of miles away from home and reading about an area like the one you grew up in, or hearing the voices of women that sound like great aunties and cousins. There are people defending their identities in places they are marginalised. There are thoughts as radical as experiences. For a few months, I stepped among these ideas, finding everything I’ve ever believed in where I never thought I would. That sense of fraudulence disappeared, for a while. I now know that, despite the imposter syndrome and everlasting nervousness, I have a voice, one that’s clumsy and rambling and has a funny accent. It was an odd sensation, and I’ve never felt as free.

- Caitlin O'Connor