If so, you are one lucky IB kid! Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw is a true work of art. As a pre-reading activity to Pygmalion, we were asked to find a quotation about social class and respond to it. This is an excellent activity to prepare yourself for the analysis of social classes and status when studying Pygmalion.
If you are studying this play for your final exam, I would strongly recommend doing this activity! Find a quote and get going! :) Here's my attempt (feel free to leave comments!):
“The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force.”
– Albert Einstein
Social class is defined by the Random House Dictionary as “a broad group in society having common economic, cultural, or political status”. In today’s Western society, social classes are often categorized as lower, middle, and upper class – a hierarchy of social status dependent on superficial aspects of a person such as their language, family name and prestige, home value, and the location of their home. After listening to a recent episode of CBC Radio’s The Current focusing on the middle class, it is very clear that income and wealth are the two major determinants of your social status in Canadian society. In the past, societies would determine social class using much more intimate aspects of a person than something as detached as their economic status; a person’s values, tastes, and morals weighed heavily in determining their social class. Although many people would like to say their social class does not impact their lives, it plays a huge role in determining your lifestyle and the way others view you on a daily basis.
As Albert Einstein states in the quote above, “the distinctions separating the social classes are false”. How can things such as wealth and income be false? Well, when we apply these one-dimensional grounds on a global level rather than a national level, we can see that somebody of a lower class in Canada is actually of the upper class in most countries around the world. This inconsistency contributes to its falsity as there is no absolute way of separating social classes. Another fallacious aspect of the distinctions which separate our social classes is how detached they are from human life. For something that has such an impact on the way people live their lives, social class should depend more on the qualities a person possesses rather than their economic standing. Yet even though these determinants of social class are false, I believe the social classes themselves contain falsity as there is no absolute method of categorizing humans by their value; there would be too many factors and too little objectivity involved in doing so.
Although I believe social classes to be fallacious themselves, they still exist in our society. Einstein claims that their existence “rest[s] on force,” and this is true as humans intentionally and unintentionally enforce social classes everyday. This subconscious need to enforce social classes could be rooted in some people’s vain necessity to feel superior to others. In our society, social classes are enforced by rules and regulations; these regulations include marrying people within your own class, associating with people within your own class, attending school with those of your own class, attending VIP events where only members of a certain class may attend, and becoming a member of class-based clubs. We enforce these social classes by excluding others in our innate necessity for supremacy and power.
I think Einstein had much intelligence in proclaiming that social class is enforced, yet although social class systems are engrained in and by our society, it is imperative that we are aware of today’s definition of social class as it is no longer an indication of a person’s value, but of their economic and political status. We must not treat people as though they are of unequal status simply because they are of a lower social class as their social class is no indication of their worthiness of respect as a human being.
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