A different type of snobbery

This is a story told to me by a former HR Director of a major retail company. It crystallizes the problem at the heart of our education system:

A new senior executive working for a major retail company decided to visit a range of stores to get to know the business better. When she got to one of the very biggest stores outside Glasgow, she discovered a young man of only 27 years of age who was responsible for the large, multi-million pound branch. This young man told her that he had left school and joined the business as a shelf-stacker and van driver, then worked his way up. He'd been hugely successful, learning sales skills and winning Store Manager of the Year which enabled him to take his then fiancée to Las Vegas for a dream holiday.

But that, he said, hadn't been the achievement that meant most to him. He produced a photograph from his wallet and showed it to the visitor. The picture showed him against a cloistered square at an Oxford college where he had attended a short course. The young man said that he kept this photograph with him because it had made his mother so proud that her son had been to an Oxford University college.

What does it say about the perceived value of practical achievement that his mother shows more pride in her son’s brief brush with academic life than in his extraordinary practical achievement in the workplace? And what do we infer from the fact that her reaction is so familiar to us - and so evocative of British culture? Of course it’s not news to anyone that Britain finds it challenging to perceive practical routes to success in the same light as academic ones; it’s ingrained in our social attitudes. In one generation we have replaced social snobbery with academic snobbery.