Between the Generations
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 1978
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sociologist A H Halsey is Professor of Social and Administrative studies at the University of Oxford. In his fifth lecture from his series entitled 'Change in British Society', Halsey investigates the relation between the generations of the nuclear family and focuses in on the primordial link between parents and dependent children.
In this lecture entitled 'Between the Generations', Professor Halsey explains how the family is the basic unit of our society. He analyses how it is a miniature reproduction of the social cells of class, of status and of culture. In examining the history of the collective memory of family, one is able to discover the changes of social structure in Britain.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.2 | This lecture in the series Change in British Society, given by A.H. H. Halsey, was originally broadcast in 1978. |
| 0:13.1 | What the few have today, the many will demand tomorrow. |
| 0:18.2 | That's Daniel Bell's summary of the social history of industrial society. Michael Young and Peter |
| 0:24.4 | Wilmot have called it the principle of stratified diffusion and turned it into a metaphor. They picture |
| 0:31.0 | successive ranks of families in Britain drawn up in a column of social class, but a column on the march. |
| 0:38.3 | The last rank keeps its distance from the first, and the distance between them doesn't lessen. |
| 0:43.7 | But as the column advances, the last rank does eventually reach and pass the point |
| 0:48.6 | which the first rank passed sometime before. |
| 0:52.5 | With this metaphor in mind, I want to look back for a moment to the |
| 0:56.5 | beginning of the century. Here's GM Young remembering the coronation year of 1902 when he was an |
| 1:02.8 | Oxford undergraduate. We looked forward, he said, to living with some improvements the sort of life |
| 1:09.1 | our fathers had lived. By we, I don't mean the wealthy classes, but the sort of life our fathers had lived. |
| 1:13.2 | By we, I don't mean the wealthy classes, |
| 1:17.5 | but the sort of people who filled the public schools and the two ancient universities. |
| 1:20.2 | Not rich, but comfortably off, |
| 1:23.4 | who took games, books and hospitality for granted. |
| 1:26.8 | Sons of lawyers, civil servants, MPs. |
| 1:30.1 | Young men who might succeed to their father's share in some old family business, or seek an outlet for their energies in India, or the Sudan, with |
| 1:35.7 | Kromer for their ideal, and Milner for their example. It was an attractive life, Young goes on, |
| 1:42.1 | I think we might say the most attractive that European |
| 1:44.7 | civilisation had ever fashioned for itself. And the prospect of living that life, and transmitting |
... |
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