Middle Class
I think I have re-discovered something about myself through my research of and writing about Oscar Wilde. I say re-discovered, because this realization coincides well with my studies of and passions about classism. It is also something I have hinted at in previous posts throughout the years. (For example, how churches believe and schools promote everyone should become middle class).
I wrote the rough draft of this post as I was sitting with my sons in a coffee shop that promotes the arts, listening to vinyl records at Bring Your Own Vinyl Night. Last night at a different location (a ministry I adore being a part of), I heard a testimony that included a proclamation how God brough forth the fulfillment of the American Dream, during which I tried to just politely squirm. I have also been a part of a detailed and frustrating conversation about how I do not have to believe (or pretend to believe) in the so-called merits of the public school system, and other perspectives are not going to change my mind. To top it off, my OCD has been extremely high because of personal situations.
It was my seventeen-year old son's idea to go to this coffee shop this evening. He knew I needed a change of scenery. While there, I pulled out my go-to method of relaxation - reading, researching, and writing. I was reminded through my reading of something about my literary obsession, Oscar Wilde. I often encounter this idea in books about the nineteenth-century author and playwright. This is his detestation of the middle class. He loathed nineteenth-century supposed values such as an infatuation with work and wealth and their practical ideals that spurned intellectualism. We could also add that he considered them hypocrites. Now, we could chalk this up to his flamboyance, his eccentricity. But I have to think he was on to something. Please hear me out.
This snippet from this book put into words what I have been feeling. I am so weary of societal tunnel-vision. And, yes, if I am honest - it is of those middle-class values Oscar Wilde emphasized. Adherents to this mindset cannot see outside of what they have been conditioned to accept. They cannot escape the box that entraps them. After so long of people trying to convert to their societal opinion (or, just as bad, the belief that this is just the way it is, has been, and will always be), I scream No! Let me repeat that. No!
I am sick of the view that school is everything. I am sick of the mindset that if I or anyone else deviates from this mindset, I am just slightly misinformed. I detest the idea that I just do not understand the value of the prominent line of thought. I need to be educated. Let me inform everyone now, I am far from uneducated. I am far from unintelligent. And I don't need the positive thinking anti-theology to make theories more palatable. I don't buy into that either (even though that is often the method of gaslighting that begins in childhood through the exact society of which I speak).
Unschooling is not exactly a middle class thought. (Perhaps this is why it's what Oscar Wilde promoted back in the late 1800s, even though there was no such things as unschooling then). It does not promote training kids for college and money-making from the age of three (five if the kid is lucky). Unschoolers do not believe school is life, just because the system tries to provide a new home for children. They do not believe work is life for adults. Work is a means to an end. It is necessary, but there are other things much more important. Unschooling does not measure success or value by monetary measurements.
Yes, rather than middle class values and church services that promote such an ideology, give me the artists, the writers, the thinkers, the prisoners trapped in literal cells rather than mental ones. I can see why Wilde preferred such company as well. I can see why he was down on such middle class philosophies, and even on the people who pushed them. I feel that latter temptation also. I should read some of his works tonight, leave behind middle class values and the socialization that promotes them. Leave behind the assumptions of "This is how it should be done. You just don't understand." Yes, I do understand. That's why I don't agree.
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