High summer. High noon. A showdown. The House of Commons.
Well ‘ard deputy sheriff Dominic Raab confronts deputy Labour leader, Angela Raynor.
Where was she during the rail strikes? Down with the strikers?
Nope.
Down with the pickets?
Nope.
Dom massages his malice.
“She was at the Glyndebourne Music Festival Sipping Champagne, Listening to Opera!”
Yikes! What a rascal!
He bangs on to the inevitable conclusion.
“Champagne socialism is back in the Labour party!”
So there.
He winks. Creepily. Cryptically.
Shouldn’t he be sectioned?
There is much Tory braying.
Does the erring Angela not know her place? Her working class place? Her cultural place? How dare she attend Glyndebourne! Opera! Mozart! The Marriage of Figaro!
It’s high culture. Not for the likes of her. How could a girl from a Comprehensive comprehend such elevated stuff? Shouldn’t she be down with the dogs? Whippets? Pickets? Thus does Dom conflate snobbery, misogyny and macho ignorance.
This malign attitude towards the arts is ubiquitous in government and education circles. Culture secretaries – the likes of Oliver Dowden,
Nadine Dorries, Sajid Javid – seem to equate acquiring culture as acquiring some kind of upward mobility, a sort of posh gossip you can flag up at dinner parties. A useful life-style adjunct – like elocution lessons. It makes our pupils more marketable.
Culture simply doesn’t work like that.
The Tories just don’t get it...
My dad was the same. He didn’t get it. But he made sure I did.
He took me to the opera. I was seven. I’ve still not recovered from the experience. The performers seemed in a foul temper. Hefty women shrieked. Obese men boomed. Anorexics perished in attics – all incontinent with passion. In Italian.
Unfair on a seven-year-old. Just wrong. Was it comedy? I fell about laughing and capsized under a chair. My dad carted me out by the ears and asked me if I wanted to grow up without “culture”.
Probably. Opera was an art form too far. There’s nothing wrong with it.
My grammar school did the same. We were forever being dragged off on high culture jaunts. One involved a group of travelling players in a version of Racine’s Andromaque. Another indelible experience, this time in French. There was again much passion and perishing and fainting and terrifically bad acting. Someone called Hector – “the great warrior” – had limbs like twiglets. Someone called Hermione took an age to noisily expire...
And someone called me collapsed in mirth and was ordered to apologise to the useless actors. Funny is funny. Bad is bad.
Government assaults on the arts and humanities continue at every level of education. Universities are getting hit. Sheffield Hallam University announced recently that it is suspending its English Literature degree.
Why? It doesn’t fit the market. It’s professionally hopeless. About the only thing you can do with it is become an English teacher and peddle more of the pointless stuff.
Universities minister, Michelle Donelan, wants to chop any course, which doesn’t add up. Education is becoming a mere financial transaction, utilitarian, the preserve of the rich in Russell Groups.
A similar barbarism rages in schools. STEM subjects rule. The arts – dance, drama, music – do not. The soul is not nourished. Literature has been ossified, shrunk. There’s little real creative writing. Set texts have set answers. I used to put them on the board for the GCSE exam.
“Five reasons Macbeth Killed the King.”
The class copied them.
There we go. Fabulous results. Rubbish teaching. No meaningful connection with the text.
Secondary schools are becoming almost “finishing schools” – like the old Lucy Clayton Modelling Emporium. Didn’t their pupils have to put a book on their heads to promote good posture? You didn’t need to read the thing. Macbeth would be good. Middlemarch even better – especially in hardback.
It wasn’t always this way.
We did anything with everyone. Beowulf. Virginia Wolf. Howlin’ Wolf. It’s how it’s taught. It’s about context and connection. It’s not only work of dead, white, straight men. It’s bespoke. It can be visceral, thrilling. beautiful, disturbing. Anything. Shelley is dangerous, Blake is dangerous. Kae Tempest rocks, Kendrick Lamar is liberating and explosive – and so is Macbeth.
The good news is that many pupils are doing it for themselves, albeit outside the classroom. Poetry has never been healthier or more diverse. Speech has never been richer. Hip-hop, rap, poetry slams, flash-fiction flourish. A living counterculture is out there – serious fun, as serious as your life.
High or Low?
A meaningless distinction.
Glyndebourne or Notting Hill Carnival.
It doesn’t matter...
Wait a minute!
Angela is confronting the Dom.
“Cut out the snobbery and brush up on your opera.”
Go Ange!
“The Marriage of Figaro is the story of a working class woman who gets the better of a privileged but dim-witted villain.”
So there.
Culture is for everyone.
Nothing is ever too good for our pupils. Nothing.
- Ian Whitham is a teacher of English, now retired, who spent many years working in the state school system of inner city London. He has written for SecEd since 2003. Read his most recent articles at http://bit.ly/seced-whitwham