The Learning Class: The New Socioeconomic Class in America

Upward mobility in the US has been discussed ad nauseum over the past few decades. The drop-off in out earning your parents was steep for those born between 1940 and 1980. Meanwhile, the overall difficulty seems to have flattened out over the past decade or two. Even more interestingly, some places (Midwest urban areas) have had a dramatic drop-off while others (the South) have never been particularly upwardly mobile and remain that way despite an influx of jobs and people. Even more analysis exists, but it’s mostly splitting hairs after a while.

My proposition is simple: If you want to change the rate of upward mobility in the modern US, and possibly more of the developed world, taking advantage of existing and emerging means of learning and applying new information and skills is the way to do it. In a world where we’ve mostly had Upper, Middle (occasionally split into Upper Middle and Lower Middle), Working, and Lower class, we could use a class that is built entirely around mobility regardless of your current place within the established social strata of modern America.

I’m thinking of a few key categories and some subcategories within them for now, such as:

Figuring It Out

What do you want/need to learn?

Where can you learn it?

How can it best be learned?

When should/can it be learned?

Why are you trying to learn it?

Using It

How can this learning be used? For personal improvement, career advancement, career or personal change, to supplement existing knowledge or skills? What is your purpose for this potential area of learning?

Are you trying to learn something for the short or long term? Some skills or knowledge are legitimately best learned for just long enough to make them useful and then they’re no longer relevant. Most learning will be intended for longer term use.

Examples

Who are some famous people who are either polymaths or at least have added to and adapted their skillset within a field or series of related endeavors? Does Mike Rowe’s use of his voice from opera singer, to early QVC host, to TV and podcasting fit this idea? How about Christopher Hitchens being able to hold an intelligent conversation on dozens of unrelated topics?

My own ridiculous life. I’ve worked jobs from door to door laundromat coupon sales and Jiffy Lube, to youth pastor and bad guy for Capitol Police training exercises, to reluctant HS teacher and now instructional designer at an R1 university. I’ve also gone from two time college dropout to PhD student at a different R1 university.

Conclusion

I think I’ve got something here. With the proliferation of information and learning resources, along with interesting work from people like Cal Newport and David Epstein, I believe there’s a unifying idea here that could really be useful to a lot of people.