Education Minister Bridget Phillipson wants to make our schools engines of ambition and social mobility. Good for her. Unfortunately, some of the the advice she has received as to how to do this demonstrates one thing more than anything else: when it comes to class prejudice, it’s earnest bourgeois reformers who habitually head the pack.
Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility, has told her that the answer lies in schools’ downplaying of middle class institutions. Out with visits to museums and theatres and references to skiing, jam-making or house-buying, which the underclass can’t connect with. And in with football club tours, graffiti workshops (local culture, don’t you know) and lessons about the Jarrow Crusade and Charles Dickens’s social activism (‘to remind our latest generations of the past accomplishments and struggles of working class communities’).
As for high culture like the theatre or classical music, whisper it quietly, but they might even like it
In a sense this radical suggestion isn’t surprising. When Phillipson announced in July that left-leaning Professor Becky Francis from the Education Endowment Foundation (an offshoot of the Sutton Trust) would be co-ordinating her curriculum review, it was clear who was likely to be approached and the line they were likely to take. That said, the prescription we have been given is a curious one, and the idea that it may lead to better-educated teenagers might seem to some less than persuasive.
An obvious point is that this is open politicisation of the curriculum. This isn’t simply a harrumphing that the thrust is leftist (something understandable from a Labour minister: no doubt a Tory would push something different, but that’s politics). More sinisterly, it involves forcing as much teaching as possible to be undertaken through a particular lens: that of social justice and activism. This is seriously constricting. Will there be room for the individualistic child who says that he is interested in history as high culture, or prefers to study Charles Dickens’s books as literature rather than their author as imprisoned debtor or social activist? It seems unlikely.
Concerned parents may also raise eyebrows at the fact that is that their children will not seem to be learning very much in exchange for their tax money. Take a youngster to a theatre or museum they wouldn’t otherwise visit and with luck it will stretch their knowledge, imagination and aesthetic appreciation. (They may even be grateful for this, either then, or in later life.) It is honestly hard to say the same about a visit to a football club, whose fortunes many probably follow on the Net anyway, or a state-sponsored perusal of spray-painted taglines.
Indeed one might say that, for all the high-minded pronouncements against cultural discrimination – nothing very new, if you remember Jeremy Bentham’s jejune bon mot nearly 200 years ago that ‘pushpin is as good as poetry’ – what we see here is little more than a condonation of educational indolence. It’s certainly easier to talk to children about what is familiar to them than to work to interest them in something that isn’t: the teaching unions will love it. Whether it is good for schools or children, or something to be welcomed by parents, is less clear.
But perhaps most importantly, the suggestion that the curriculum needs to accurately reflect the real-life concerns of working class children seems to show remarkable condescension and contempt for the abilities of those children. It is, for example, suggested, seemingly with a straight face, that an exam question relating to the price of a house or a skiing holiday will be worse understood by a child merely because her parents rent a council flat and don’t ski. Really? Next thing they’ll be saying that questions should not relate to baths because the working classes think they’re things you keep coal in.
For that matter, is it necessarily true (save in answer to possibly loaded questions) that working class children only want what is familiar to their experience? Many, especially the poorest and worst-housed, might – one would have thought – rather appreciate a chance of a mental escape from their drab, humdrum existence in a council flat in South London surrounded by drug dealers, noisy teenagers and a blaring television set. One might also have thought that one invaluable feature of state schools was that they provided precisely this. It is as good for them to see a middle class lifestyle different from their own, as it is for richer pupils to be taught about the conditions in Jarrow in the 1930s. As for high culture like the theatre or classical music, whisper it quietly, but they might even like it.
If this is right, then the recipe for social mobility would seem to be the exact opposite of what is being presented to the government. Schools owe it to children at the bottom of the social heap to expose them to as much as possible that represents aspirational things and values outside their ordinary experience, middle class or not. Take that potential escape route away, in the name of removing cultural bias, and you keep the underclass in its place. Well-meaning attachment to some rose-tinted idea of authentic working class culture does little more than perpetuate what some unfortunately see as the picturesque poverty that lies behind it.
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