FEATURE: CULTURAL EDUCATION


• Amend the teaching of drama, art and music so that they examine why formalist versions of these provide more distinction than representational versions. Teach formalism and give students access to an understanding of abstract forms and why the establishment seeks to make you believe what is inherently meaningless is redolent with a meaning that only their own ‘pure’ gaze can detect.


• Study the inherent vacuity of the flimsy edifices of manners, deportment, accent and bearing in drama lessons, along with how these forms of ruling class cultural capital are used to extract resources from others.


• Use form time to read a variety of canonical and non-canonical texts (those from different cultures to the dominant one).


every old idea is correct and anything new is suspect, and the job’s done. The seditious path is rather more complex in


that it involves outwitting the establishment view. Ofsted’s mistake in defining cultural capital without reference to the sociologist who coined the term is egregious, and it gives progressive- thinking schools an opportunity to work within the letter of the law but outside of its spirit since the concept of cultural capital, as defined by Pierre Bourdieu, actually means the direct opposite of what Ofsted think it does. Ofsted defines cultural capital through an


unacknowledged and misquoted reference to Matthew Arnold’s idea of “the best which has been thought and said”. Arnold was an HMI and a poet and, broadly, his idea was that culture was disinterested and impartial, not subject to any economic interest. Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital seeks to disprove this by pointing out that our ‘tastes’ in culture generally correspond to our position in the social space: ruling class people like opera, Latin, classics, classical music etc. Working class people are more likely to be interested in the ‘popular’ culture that the ruling class establishment so abhors. So, for Bourdieu, the field of culture is one in which we seek distinction from the animalistic and vulgar other, and what Ofsted have done here is define something by its opposite. Culture is not disinterested; it is a hidden means of the transfer of economic wealth down generations. A Bourdieuean approach to equipping students


with culture would be to enter young people into the game that culture is, but, at the same time, explaining the rules of that game to them and showing how culture is used in the social world to obtain distinction. The fact that Ofsted has accidentally introduced Bourdieu’s ideas as being something we might consider when curating a curriculum gives you a free pass to consider more seditious views of culture that examine the ‘common sense’ of establishment ideas to see if they are at all true. It is not a defensible position to be checking for the provision of cultural capital in schools and to then say you cannot teach what the idea means and where it comes from, so a progressive approach might consider doing the following:


• Teach a scheme of work on Matthew Arnold in English that examines critically what the idea of “the best which has been thought and said” might mean, how it originated from a top public


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school, how it infers that there is one legitimate culture and that is white and middle (or ruling) class, that his poetry is covertly racist, that he was friends with the out-and-out racist, Thomas Carlyle, and that the idea was to educate the middle classes in culture so as to divert from the alleged potential chaos of working-class males having been given the vote.


• Examine the ruling class notion, which also originated at the very same top public school, that sport develops character and why the establishment might be quite so happy that the working-class spends so much of their time and energy focused on sport when they might, instead, be examining how the social world is structured.


• Teach them the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu – particularly, how culture is used to denote animalism in others and study what it is about forms of popular culture that are so offensive to the establishment (they cannot control them and these art forms are generally used to speak of the conditions of working-class life and as vehicles of protest) that they want to replace them with the culture in which they, themselves, specialise.


• Where legitimate culture is on the curriculum, teach its political context and how it has been used, historically, as a tool of oppression.


• Set up after school clubs in which teachers are asked to share their passions. These might include listening clubs in which students listen to and discuss classic records and a film club where they are introduced to films they might not otherwise encounter.


• Teach rhetoric in English lessons and explain its historical and present use to make people vote against their own interests.


Clearly, this is a more complex path than just


doing what you are told. But for a school that was serious about using the idea of cultural capital as more than just a means of getting students to accede that the culture of their masters is better than that which they already possess, it would be worth the while …. If only to see the look on the inspectors’ faces when you tell them what you have done and show how deeply well informed you are about the concept in comparison to their own rather worried looks of blank incomprehension.


Phil Beadle is an experienced teacher, author, broadcaster, speaker, and journalist (philbeadle.com). His latest book The Fascist Painting: What is Cultural Capital?, published by John Catt Educational, is a densely argued and wide ranging exploration into ‘cultural capital’, its meaning and place within the school curriculum.


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