Учебное пособие по английскому языку для студентов II курса

Cross-cultural Notes:
1. African-American – a recent US name for black Americans descended from Africans, especially those descended from American slaves. In the 1990s, the name became more popular and politically correct than ‘black’. About 12% of the US population are African Americans.
2. meritocracy [LmerI'tOkrRsI] – a social system which gives the highest positions to those with the most ability.
3. school district (Amer.) – an area within one state that includes a number of primary and secondary schools which are governed together.
4. the American dream – the idea that the US offers opportunities for a good and successful life. For minorities and people coming from abroad to live in America, the dream also includes freedom and equal rights. Many immigrants to the US in the early 20^th century believed in the American dream.
5. chief executive officer – the person in charge of a large company.


Class in America
One difficulty in talking about class is that the word means different things to different people. At its most basic, classes are known to be groups of people of similar economic and social position; people who, for that reason, may share political attitudes, lifestyles, consumption patterns, cultural interests and opportunities to get ahead. As some sociologists and marketing consultants see it, the commonly accepted big three classes – the upper, middle and working classes – have broken down into dozens of microclasses, defined by occupations or lifestyles.

Today, class is a source of identity, a system of exclusion, culture and taste. It is an accident of birth that can influence the outcome of a life. Some Americans barely notice it; others feel its weight in powerful ways.

Religion and political allegiances are no longer reliable markers of class. And the once tight connection between race and class has weakened, too, as many African-Americans have moved into the middle and upper middle classes. The United States has gone a long way toward an appearance of classlessness. It has become harder to identify people’s status in the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the God they worship, the colour of the skin.

But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not a lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.

Mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. Today, anyone may have a chance at becoming a Supreme Court justice or a chief executive officer, and there are more and more self-made billionaires. At the same time, new research on mobility indicates that an overwhelming majority of Americans are more likely to end up in the class into which they were born.

Still, more Americans than 20 years ago believe it is possible to start out poor, work hard and become rich. They say hard work and a good education are more important to getting ahead than connections or a wealthy background. The old system of inherited privilege has been replaced by merit. But it turns out to be at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education and connections cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy rewards. When their children then succeed, their success is seen as earned.

The drives to buy a house in the best school district, channel a child into the right pre-school program or get an appointment with the best medical specialist are all part of a quiet contest among social groups that the affluent and educated are winning.

Family structure, too, differs increasingly along class lines. The educated and affluent are more likely than others to have their children while married. They have fewer children and have them later, when their earning power is high. Those widening differences have left the educated and affluent in a superior position when it comes to investing in their children. In the past people used to believe that the offspring of the poor had chances as good as the chances of the offspring of the rich. That’s not true today.

Nevertheless, many Americans say that they have moved up the nation’s class ladder. Americans have never been comfortable with the notion of a hierarchy based on anything other than talent and hard work. Class contradicts their assumptions about the American dream, equal opportunity and the reasons for their own successes and even failures. Without confidence in the possibility of moving up, there would almost certainly be fewer success stories.
(After Janny Scott and David Leonhardt, The New York Times, 2005.)