The popular documentary “the Up series”, made by Granada Television and supported by the Doctor Michael Apted, is a timeless interesting piece of work. In 1964, Doctor Apted had for goal to follow the life of children in the late nineties. Fourteen, seven-year-old British hildren were chosen in an arbitrary way. Some came from poor families and some others came from wealthy families. The purpose of this arbitrary selection was to represent the different socio-economic environments of England and the influences on their path in life. Every seven years until their fifties, question and situations were exposed to them and their answers and ways of seeing their future were presented. The doctor said: “Give me a child at 7 and I will show you the men.” This documentary, that look also like a cultural study, was a success.

By watching the first episode, you can quickly see that the children are from different socio-economic classes. The way they talked and the way they are dressing are telling us a lot about them. At this young age, the children are highly influenced by their surrounding. That is where this question came from: Is the social class influences the future of children? Doctor Apted focused on asking the young ones where they were seeing themselves in the future. He also asked them what they were thinking about the differences between the classes, and if the place where they were going to go to University was important. Other subjects as politics, economy and love are exposed to the fourteen children. The children that came from posh families already knew where they were going to University, because they had talked about it with their parents. You can imagine, that they wanted to follow the path of their parents. The culture reproduction of their habits and behavior is observable. The children that came from the worker class did not have the chance to talk about this with their parents. Their future seemed less planned out than the others. There is a great hegemonic representation. “Hegemony refers to the processes by which dominant culture maintains its dominant position”. As the episodes are being produced, we can observe that not all the children follow the path that they had in mind. Some of the children from the working finished with great accomplishments.