At Harvard, focus on the upper class
Upper-class parents have a variety of tools to help their children succeed in a changing world and improve their social status, advantages not readily available to poorer families, according to a panel at a Harvard conference. Living in wealthy neighborhoods, choosing among good schools, and engaging in cultural activities with children are all ways that affluent parents around the world can extend their social position into the next generation, the scholars said Friday at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs conference on “Changing Middle Classes: Comparative and Global Perspectives.” The upper middle class is “attempting to produce particular effective social boundaries which could separate them from … the lower middle classes in an unfortunately irreversible way,” said María Luisa Méndez, director of the School of Sociology, Universidad Diego Portales, in Chile, in a joint presentation with Modesto Gayo, a professor at the same school. Higher-income parents, though, are hardly unified in their child-rearing...