High culture within reach
Anastasia De Waal, 2 October 2009
How best to instil an interest in culture amongst young people today was – broadly – the theme of a New Statesman debate with Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw at the Labour Party Conference. Whether culture is or should be ‘useful’ in a productive sense aside, how can young people be engaged in the arts?
Taking culture in this context to mean what we consider to be ‘high’ culture – from art to opera, to literature and dance – two things are clear. Firstly, if you’re aiming to get young people interested in culture, you need to immerse them in it. Popular culture is ubiquitous and cheap – and popular. The argument that art, theatre, ballet etc. isn’t engaging many young people because it’s not ‘relevant’ to their lives doesn’t wash. Teenagers can relate no more to a rap-star in the Hollywood hills than they can to William Shakespeare. What’s largely determining the difference in level of engagement is the level of exposure to it. To an extent a case in point is when Hollywood, a heartthrob and advertising giants did Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet infiltrated the lives of young people as entertainment rather than as a set text. This is not to say that culture needs to be adapted to an MTV vernacular to appeal, but rather it needs to be ‘massified’ to reach young people. Making museums and art galleries free has been a hugely important contribution to massification; but access entails more than literal access.
The other way to get young people interested in culture is to get children immersed in it. School plays a fundamentally important role, both in instilling the necessary skills to be able to access culture (notably literacy) and in providing universal opportunities of exposure to culture. Many children, and not just the deprived, will not spend much of their childhood either in a theatre or an art gallery with their parents. In the most effective schools cultural trips are not annual luxuries but ordinary parts of school life. Seeds of appreciation for the arts do need to be sown. An exhibition will seem alien to a small child who has never been to a gallery before – but it will be embraced by a small child for whom looking at pictures is a regular and familiar activity. That child is much more likely to turn into a ‘cultured’ adult, regardless of their background. Perhaps there is some notion that for the arts to be excellent they need to be ‘special’. Yet culture is more likely to be lost on people if it is rationed.
The other side of culture in schools is the way in which it aides learning. The New York Times today runs a piece under the headline ‘Schools Adopt Art as Building Block of Education’. The article looks at the ‘…growing number of newly built or renovated public schools across the country that look more like cultural centers than the austere, utilitarian houses of learning of the past’:
‘The Columbus school incorporates sculpture and other art into nearly every corner of its year-old building with the hope that it will inspire students in this working-class Hispanic neighborhood to learn.
‘Seventh graders figure out direction by mapping the sculptures of the north, south, east and west winds that serve as compass points for the building. And fifth graders study astronomy by searching for Cassiopeia in an inlaid night sky that stretches across the lobby floor.’
In short, it can be both said that a good education is necessary for imbibing a love of culture and that culture is necessary for imbibing a love of learning. To put high culture within the reach of young people, it needs to be made accessible in every sense.