Horizon

What happened to Matthew Arnold's idea that to have culture was to know the best that has been said and done in the world? Are you saying that that high culture, because of its association with elites, is actually of no use to the modern person?
It all sounds like Julie Burchill and her Modern Review all those years ago.

The most important point made in the article is that universities, among other institutions, are reducing their standards in order to be more "inclusive". I really don't think that's even something that can reasonably be argued, it's there for anyone to see--very much so in American public universities at the undergraduate level, at least. I agree that this is bad and I don't think there is anything backward-looking about wanting it to stop.

The barriers to education and to culture that need to be eliminated are ones of access. These, it seems to me, are what really walled off the old cultural elite. People need to be able to go to any school that will have them regardless of their financial situation, their class, etc., but certainly not in spite of their ability or motivation.

I think for the most part people don't like to do much more than what is expected of them. Attempting to make inherently difficult things easy for the sake of "democracy"...I just don't see the connection.

I agree that this is bad and I don't think there is anything backward-looking about wanting it to stop.

I guess my point is not so much that this process is cost-free (it isn't, though there are gains as well) but that I doubt there is anything much that it can be done about it either way.

Well all you lefties should know that as the years of 'progressive' education roll on: dumbing down, teaching people shit and telling them they're educated, social engineering and old class war chicanery, the Right will dance on your heads and have every right to. Only this morning in the odious but readable Daily Mail Oxford and Cambridge are mooting going private to evade having to take mediocre candidates in the name of socialism.
It's like a farce. Education is bad in England and for years they've been trying to hide it, Maggie dumbed it down some to keep middle england quiet: now that's ended up with everyone passing every exam at top marks. The other side of it is all the old Marxist beards thinking you can change england for the better if you just let the working class and ethnic minorities have the lion share of university places, *regardless of whether they're any good or not*. Big, big mistake. I have to say I like Hitchens Minor's description of british education: The National Ignorance Service.

A large part of the problem is that only wealthier children are well prepared for college. The answer should not be to make college easier but to improve general public (public in the American sense) pre-college education for everyone. But that problem continues to get only the most cursory lip service from politicians and officials.

Also, a bachelor's degree should not be the only gateway to a reasonable living and respectability in this society. As long as it is, people who would be better off doing something else (like whatever they end up doing after they get their irrelevant English degrees) will continue to demand access, and professors will continue to lower their expectations to accomodate them.

The denigration of education and knowledge for its own sake which Furedi points to is not, I think, a cause of these bad policies but a symptom of them. Universities are cranking out thousands of English and Psychology and History majors every year who get their degrees only to procede to sell cars or fix computers or sit around in office jobs looking busy, who never intended to do anything else and who knew all along that what they were studying had no practical relevance to what they would end up doing, that they chose their major in large part because it would be easy, and that no one ever cared what they really thought of Jane Eyre, including themselves. It's no wonder that knowledge, truth, education for its own sake has started to sound hollow to so many people, now that higher education has become little more than a rite of passage to the middle class.

Or so it seems to me.

Or so it seems to me.

I think the problem is that Furedi's jumbling together a whole bunch of issues, some of which (the problem with higher education, for example) I have some sympathy with and some I don't, and which don't in any case have a straightforward connection.

Take the Tyne and Wear Museum, for instance. I'm not familiar with it and we only get Furedi's possibly misleading description, but I'm at a loss to understand why some exhibits that have been chosen by members of the public are symptoms of giving us what they think is good for us. I mean, by definition, there's something wrong with the verb there, isn't there? How are "we" being "given" anything in such a model? Surely there's a possible middle-ground; museums don't have to (and shouldn't) hold plebiscites on every single exhibit, but I don't find the idea of ordinary members of the public being encouraged to take an active interest in critical selection nearly as horrifying as Furedi apparently does.

I grant you that there isn't necessarily anything of great importance in a museum involving its patrons in the process of selection, and furthermore I am all for museums generally displaying the peripheral pieces in their collection more often. A lot of large cultural institutions like museums and orchestras stick to the greatest hits in an attempt to draw crowds, so this scheme seems to me an interesting and laudable experiment. Still, it does seem in line with what I take from these reviews to be Furedi's main target, namely an ideology which places inclusion (really, when you get down to it, the better word may be popularity) above all other considerations.

What does bother me about what I take to be Furedi's overall argument is that I do not believe that these problems he points to are primarily ideological. Certainly this ideology of inclusion, if that's an accurate thing to call it, is central. But as I tried to imply above, the real problem is that we are taking shortcuts. Giving everyone a good secondary education is difficult and expensive. Counting the number of people who are the first in their families to go to college, regardless of their level of preparation or their abilities, is much easier. It seems to me that this has more to do with the nature of bureaucracy than the ideology behind it.

But, again, I'm focusing on education.

One or 2 personal experiences to share:
I had some experience teaching in higher education in the mid-90s, soon after finishing my own PhD (which left me mainly unemployed for 9 years). I found that standards had plummeted since my undergrad days. Second year undergraduates in an arts subject were unable to construct essays; some even simply regurgitated material from a text book, headings included. Yet it was expected that they should pass because funding depended on it... Those of my own former tutors who are still teaching are disillusioned and demoralised.
Students are being put into debt because of a utilitarian, market-driven approach to education that (and let's be frank about it) was primarily about temporarily reducing youth unemployment figures. They are not having the kind of rounded, rigorous education and scope for intellectual exploration that was available to me, in the dying years of the grants system. They're juggling studying with jobs, debt, & c.
Elitism is nothing to be ashamed of when it is based on intellectual ability - which is not dependent on income. If you had the ability, you got a university place, and you were properly funded (parental contributions being means-tested). My background? Council estates, comprehensive school. First member of my maternal family to go to university, second of paternal (Dad having gone to Ruskin College and become a mature student). Socialist? Yes, I am, certainly left of 'New Labour'.

As to museums: again, what is at work is a notion that anything which is thought-provoking/intellectually demanded is 'elitist', and that populism=good under all circumstances. (There is also, it seems to me, a subtext that 'working class people=stupid, and to attract them we have to make things simple" - which is patronising beyond belief.) The balance between entertainment and education in the sector is currently positioned more heavily toward entertainment - and also the idea that museums and galleries should really be functioning as part of social services provision. I recommend Alexander Chancellor's article, 'Pump up the volume', Guardian Magazine, 27 Dec. 2003. He points out accurately that in some quarters funding is dependent on museums and galleries proving they are meeting 'social inclusion' targets.
Don't get me on to the 'theme-parking' of history, but that's a part of it. In the Museums Journal the other year, I read a case re: a museum which had asked visitors to vote on which piece of sculpture from a recent exhibition they wanted to be kept. The curators then found themselves faced with having to retain a tacky piece of Princess Diana memorabilia of no aesthetic merit... There was also a debate when a 'professional' suggested in an article that museums should provide 'safe spaces' for family conciliation and have a room set aside for it. Since many are pressed for space for their exhibitions, storage, and education work, this was absurd... But some of the wackier fringes of PC do pop up with astonishing regularity in the Museums Journal...

There was also a debate when a 'professional' suggested in an article that museums should provide 'safe spaces' for family conciliation and have a room set aside for it.

That is pretty funny: "My wife doesn't understand me ... or Brancusi".

(Good comment BTW, M.A.)

Thanks!
Here's the link to the Alexander Chancellor piece, which is interesting:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1112767,00.html

It distresses me to see people who like to think of themselves as 'on the Left' not merely acquiescing but actively participating in the cultural disenfranchisement of the general population. '1984''s depoliticising, intellectually ennervating 'Prole' culture of sport and porn (the modern age's 'bread and circuses', to which we may now add reality TV) has been made real. But if you want to see how people can re-engage with history & c, and get to grips with its ramifications in the modern world, I recommend Peter Watkins' 'La Commune'.

An excellent fusillade MA!

'...material from a text book, headings included. Yet it was expected that they should pass because funding depended on it... '

Impressing the funding bodies with worthy stats at any cost is how theatre has been ruined in England. It is a serious objection i have to the Left.