Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Heidelberg, language: English, abstract: “Education in its most genuine form must be reduced to one’s relation to it.” Although very much related to the fields of sociology, the paper can nevertheless be considered as a literary interpretation. It is primarily targeted on examining the different aspects of class occurring in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and E.M. Forster’s Howards End, and will attempt to put them into relation to each other. Furthermore, the classes occurring in the two novels shall be analysed in respect of their relation to education and culture. Especially in the course of recent discussions on poverty and the lower classes in Germany, the subject – which is significantly “harder to talk about […] than other axes of oppression” – surely does not lack a certain relevance.