Anti-Oppressive Practice: New windows

A university lecturer I knew some years ago once mocked a student's excitement that her family were getting new windows in their council flat. The derision was casual, almost unconscious. Her joy, her pride in something that meant real material improvement in her home and her life, was somehow inappropriate to him. Misplaced. Too small.

I've thought about that moment a lot nearly twenty years since. What it revealed wasn't just snobbery, it was a complete failure to notice the wider field. An inability, or an unwillingness, to hold someone else's reality alongside his own.