Just a note on the whole class-experience discussion (Antigram, Jodi Dean, Shaviro, etc.): the original focus of the discussion was education, and the relationship between students' misplaced self-perception (whether it be excessive or overly self-critical) and their academic achievement. I rather wish it had stuck to this, rather than to attacks on experience (the argument from experience is only a fallacy when you try and use testimony, say, to prove something greater exists, e.g. God, and have no other evidence to back this up).

Anecdote and reflections upon one's upbringing in the light of the revelation that not everybody had the same experience as me are frequently of great value: how else do we get to an understanding of class than by comparing the gap between how class is experienced (falsely or otherwise) and the economic and social structures that perpetuate this division? A Year Zero approach to class in which one should simultaneously possess a strict Marxist conception of class combined with an acceptance of responsibility for one's own position as a subject seems unnecessarily punitive and not necessarily useful for attempting to change entrenched (but crucially not unshakeable) class divisions. (Incidentally, the odd ahistoricism of psychoanalytic categories frequently seems to me to be a major problem for any historical materialist analysis - as does the absence of any notion of a collective subject. But this is rather old-fashioned quibbling, perhaps.)

Why education, then? Education seems to me to be a good way of analysing some of the more concrete elements of class division, the way in which class perpetuates itself ideologically. Here we have a structure (schooling), legally imposed, which creates different kinds of social groups. It is neither based on academic capacity (although it sometimes claims to be via the entrance exam), nor equality at the level of the teaching, curriculum or opportunities provided. It is based on economic differentiation, and the perpetuation of that difference by any means necessary - convincing otherwise not-very-bright children that they are the best thing since primitive accumulation is one of the products that Private schools sell, along with a system of social networks, increased cultural expectation that you will go to university, etc.

Now, I'm not sure what it is that parents tell themselves they're doing when they pay (often at considerable financial incovenience) for little Wotsit to go to a 'better' school: perhaps they genuinely think their child is special (in a non-reflexive way of course); perhaps they're worried little Wotsit might get beaten up at his or her local Comprehensive; perhaps they think that a member of their family has a rightful place in the echelons of upper class society. It might be one or all of these things, and several others besides.

The point is, about 7% of the population of the UK go to Public Schools, and yet they are everywhere, running everything and behaving, as they have always done, as if they have an absolute, total right to be and behave however they want, wherever they might be. Confidence is one of the immaterial but real things imparted by this kind of schooling, regardless of whether it is 'true' or not.

Note, however, that there is nothing wrong with confidence as such - on the contrary, an innumerable amount of social and personal interactions would be impossible without it. However, misplaced confidence, the total and non-reflexive self-assertion that you and everything you do is wonderful, simply because you are the one doing it, is horrible. It's horrible to be around, and it's even more horrible because it unfortunately counts for so much. (The kind of confidence that Public Schools impart also works, incidentally, to cover up over the kinds of questions any bright kid might have 'why do I deserve to be here, Mummy?', 'Because you're special, darling!'.)

Class mobility in Britain is appalling. I've said before that a 'quiet revolution' would be in the offing if working class and lower middle class kids were in possession of a self-conception that could accommodate their successes, as well as their failures, in education, and that education itself could be a way of doing this. This seems to me to be a more immediate and material, if necessarily limited, response to some of the effects of class inequality. Or, if this is rather too earnestly put, imagine a Britain without Public Schools. It'd be a different world!