I've seen this happen with working class people in high universities. It's not a class issue, you can learn it from others.
I am in no way lower class, but I was brought up with a distinctly meritorious mindset (and one that I'm generally thankful for on the whole). But it places one at a huge disadvantage in our education system.
Office hours were for people who didn't understand the assignment or the material. To go otherwise would be borderline offensive and waste important people's time. What else could they possibly be for?
Similarly, what is there to discuss about a grade? It makes as much sense as 'I'm going to talk to my lecturer about the number 7'.
The idea of running drafts or queries about assignments past a lecturer or tutor beforehand still strikes me emotionally as, well, cheating. It's not fair, people wouldn't give individual students unique insights into the assessment. How absurd! They'd have the integrity to resign from such a clearly corrupt system before something like that took hold! No one would stand for it!
Kissing arse? Getting your face known? But assessment is objective so it would be pointless at best, unethical towards both self and society at worst...
Of course now, older and wiser, I know better. But at the time, every message most children receive is to explicitly hide how the social system actually works and reinforce the divisions that are actually there and pretend that systems are objective measurements of ranking ability.
My theory is this: If you're smart enough to think that merit should matter, it's easy to fall into the trap of meritocracy. If you look around and realize, obviously, that this is not a meritocracy, then value must be derived from something that isn't merit.
Spoiler: It's relationships that matter, not merit.