Just Kidding! - Back to "Class"

And just as I thought I was going to be able to escape Junior Theme until we got our revised papers back... We are now starting the book The Great Gatsby. Starting today, we talked a lot about social class and how it is determined. Our worksheets read upper class, middle class, and lower class. It sounded too familiar.

It is my opinion that social class is determined most easily by income. I can't make the claim that wealth is how it is determined because I associate wealth with appearance, and as my Junior Theme taught me, appearance isn't everything! Most people live beyond their means and in a pile of debt because they decide to buy an expensive car or live in an area that they can't afford or wear designer clothes etc. Appearance just can't be the determining factor anymore. And what about something like education? Maybe that can be a form of determining class, but who is to say where to draw the lines? High school graduates versus college graduates versus graduate school attendees, etc. That's not really measurable because different schools provide different things. It's much harder to measure quality than quantity

Quantity is where the numbers of incomes play a role. It is easy to say that a person making x amount of money per year is in this class. That's what I did for Junior Theme, saying that a member of the middle class makes between $40,000 and $200,000 but that's a big range. And it also depends on the number of people that a person is supporting with that money. There's no simple answer. It is definitely thought-provoking.

It's a good thing I liked my Junior Theme topic, because it looks like it's not going away...