in general, they are actually correct. It’s not that life in post-industrial Britain is materially awful by global standards, clearly it is not and clearly things are quite substantially better than they were a century ago, but it seems to me that the drudgery of it all encourages many teenagers to just give up on their dreams and accept ‘their place’. This remaking of humans to fit social norms is of course what education is about, from ‘tribal’ initiation systems to state schools.
