[BoxFour]

Sure, but these are all true of middle-class employees as well:

1) Many middle-class families rent and their landlords aren’t necessarily any more understanding.

2) Not to be too political, but many middle-class employees don’t enjoy a friendly relationship with police either and similarly can easily “fail”.

If your argument is that being wealthy affords you a lot of leeway to fail in life, I mostly agree (though again, there are plenty of minority groups who would disagree that wealth always affords that privilege), but “middle class” encompasses a very wide swath of people which this doesn’t apply to. Many middle-class employees in the US are a paycheck or two away from being pretty destitute.

Maybe you meant “professional” or “upper class” instead?

[ElevenLathe]

We can quibble about where to draw the markers, but my point is that these "lessons" that people in these comments are decrying as mostly not true about the "real world", are in fact true for some people, likely even some of the people that you went to school with. You and I heard our asshole math teacher say "It's not gonna be this easy in the real world, cats and kittens!" and probably now regard that as the opposite of true. Many others wish life was as easy as high school. Thanks for the engagement but I don't see any point in "arguing" this point -- that we appear to both agree on -- any further.

[BoxFour]

I don’t think we do agree, but fair enough. I’ll “disagree and commit”.