FEATURE: CULTURAL EDUCATION
Implementing cultural capital I
n the first of our features this month on the importance of cultural education in our
schools we speak to author Phil Beadle, who examines what cultural capital is, why it should be questioned and what it means for teaching in secondary schools.
Doing what you’re told can cost less in terms of thought and effort than doing the right thing – as, being heads and deputies, you already know – and the difficulty in determining how to respond to Ofsted checking up on the provision of ‘cultural capital’ in schools is to decide where you stand as regards whether the done thing and the right thing are, at all, the same thing. Having spent six months researching this area -
months that have resulted in the production of an arguably serious text on the matter, I can confirm that, pretty well unquestionably, what is behind this apparently innocent notion is a push for more canonical culture to be present in schools. There are two ways of viewing this push: either it is a genuine attempt to give our students access to ‘the classics’ so that they might be better educated in a British, perhaps specifically English, version of culture, or it is a semi-naked attempt to assert that only that traditional white (predominantly male) European version of culture is the legitimate object of study in our schools. Your view of this will affect the path you take.
If yours is a traditionalist view, then you will be untroubled by the many implications that acting in obedience to the covert demands of cultural capital throws up (and I use this phrase
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deliberately); if you detect this as just one more element of a culture war in which an authoritarian establishment asserts that their culture is the only legitimate version for study, then you will just have to be cleverer than the people outlining the expectations about how the curriculum treats culture. The first path is simpler. ‘Legitimate’ culture is
traditional European culture. To conform you would simply get your art department to focus on formalism rather than representation and ensure there are visits to art galleries; you would ensure that music lessons are weighted in the direction of studying European classical composers (this might include diversions into opera (specifically Wagner (if you catch my drift))) than any other form; you would stipulate that the drama department compulsorily study one Shakespeare text a year and have students attend productions of the same; and you would ensure that the study of literature, including that of poetry, elevates the pre-twentieth century text over anything modern and probably holds modernity, specifically the idea that non-white people can express themselves with any validity in higher literary forms, as being somehow untrustworthy. If this is your path, then it’s easy enough. Just tell kids that
December 2020
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