I read this last week and just wanted to come back and say that I tried watching Bridgerton because of this post. I couldn't get through an episode (though I may revisit it eventually), but it remains an interesting post. When you mention loyalties to schools, it also makes me think of how college is less strictly something that you go to for a specific purpose and has widened into something you go to because 1) you don't know what else to do, or 2) it is something you are supposed to do (or possibly in terms of your post, something that socially is more associated with the "upstairs"). In Bridgerton, it seems like they have already gone through the second point, and don't have a problem with the first point - besides romance, their lives already look set. Maybe students aren't looking for belonging from an institution as much as they're looking for groundedness, and institutions themselves don't really offer that. Just some thoughts your post inspired.
Also, I love the photo you chose. What a great still.
Some Brit aristo families may have been 'abolitionist' at least outwardly but they were all DEEPLY Anti-Semitic to use that phrase I now loathe. As were the British Working Class. It was the Middle Class and those Quaker mostly,but also Unitarian and some other nonconformist adherents who represented the liberal, rational,reason driven band of society whose thinking came to lead the 20th century and has somehow either proved toxic or got subtly hijacked and made toxic.
I read this last week and just wanted to come back and say that I tried watching Bridgerton because of this post. I couldn't get through an episode (though I may revisit it eventually), but it remains an interesting post. When you mention loyalties to schools, it also makes me think of how college is less strictly something that you go to for a specific purpose and has widened into something you go to because 1) you don't know what else to do, or 2) it is something you are supposed to do (or possibly in terms of your post, something that socially is more associated with the "upstairs"). In Bridgerton, it seems like they have already gone through the second point, and don't have a problem with the first point - besides romance, their lives already look set. Maybe students aren't looking for belonging from an institution as much as they're looking for groundedness, and institutions themselves don't really offer that. Just some thoughts your post inspired.
Also, I love the photo you chose. What a great still.
Some Brit aristo families may have been 'abolitionist' at least outwardly but they were all DEEPLY Anti-Semitic to use that phrase I now loathe. As were the British Working Class. It was the Middle Class and those Quaker mostly,but also Unitarian and some other nonconformist adherents who represented the liberal, rational,reason driven band of society whose thinking came to lead the 20th century and has somehow either proved toxic or got subtly hijacked and made toxic.
Yes the pro-market reason-drive striving people who don't show up in Bridgerton run higher ed today but garb themselves in robes and floppy hats.