Culture and equality in education

The advent of comprehensive education implies a search for a common culture, or a common treatment of culture, across the whole school population. This article reviews the present stage in this search, attempting to define a suitable treatment of culture by secondary schools. The history of schools’ treatment of cultural sources is briefly invoked, particularly the differences in treatment found in grammar and secondary modern schools. Purportedly progressive attitudes to ‘formal’ or ‘high’ culture are analysed and found to be too simplistic. Traditional education is shown not to have genuinely served its own’ supposed cultural aims, whilst progressives’ rejection to those aims is shown to be inadequate as a reaction to what traditional education actually did rather than claimed to do. It is proposed that a more engaged approach to formal culture, involving critical receptivity, is appropriate for all pupils, and would also require the nourishment of a more receptive attitude to pupils’ own creativity.

Since we have liberated the term ‘culture’ from meaning merely a rarified level of works of art, it has become so all‐embracing as to be almost unmanageable. Influenced by anthropology, we now tend to think of culture as extending to the most casual level of value and idea by which we live our daily lives. It even includes our most informal language habits.

The difficulty, of course, with such an all‐embracing notion is that it makes the subject almost impossible to talk about. Criteria of quality , and currency are blurred. Part of the same confusion is that the education system, formerly seen as the custodian of ‘culture’, now has no name for the special resources of knowledge which are ‐‐ or used to be ‐‐ its particular responsibility.

I will use culture here to mean those public works or activities which represent man to himself and are value laden. Thus literature, psychology, history, philosophy, politics, law, economics and sociology would all be included. They might have scientific elements but they still convey normative images of man.

If the concept of culture itself, even as so defined, has a blunt edge, we must discriminate elements within it in order to make the area susceptible to discussion. To get a picture of how schools, traditionally, have mediated culture, we must distinguish at least five broad elements:

1. formal, by which is meant that part in which academic and professional institutions specialize;

2. informal, meaning relatively spontaneous and non‐centralized activities, including ordinary conversation;

3. mass culture, such as films, television, popular music, advertising;

4. avant‐garde culture, arising out of a sense of crisis in the formal culture; and

5. ethnic, other than that which coincides with the content of previous categories.

These are pretty crude categories, but they are a little better than such common divisions as ‘high/low’, ‘popular/serious’ and ‘traditional/contemporary’, and they permit some analysis of relationships between different elements within our culture as a whole.