Culture and the Grammar School

Harry Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138221154
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315411118
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book, first published in 1965, discusses the nature of the grammar school, its curriculum and teaching methods, comparisons with sixth form education, and the change in its organisation and attitudes during a time of rapid social change in 1960s Britain. This title will be of interest to students of history, sociology and education.

1

What do We Mean by Culture?

TWO EMINENT American sociologists have stated that, in their review of definitions of culture in 1950, they had already found 164 definitions. By this time, no doubt, this number must have grown to more than 200. I do not intend to add one more to the number, but since there can hardly be a word in the English language which is used in so many different senses, it is important, especially in a book of this character, that when we use it we should be quite clear what we mean by it. What we have to watch for in particular, in many contemporary discussions, is a subtle and unannounced change in definition.

Writing in 1869, Matthew Arnold stated clearly his view of culture in his famous work Culture and Anarchy—‘culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world’. This perfectionist view has influenced many writers and thinkers, and is still important today. Two years later, the anthropologist Edward B. Tylor gave his definition—‘culture or civilisation, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’. The anthropological view of culture has developed in importance in this century, and it is now clear that the conception of culture as a way of life has triumphed over Arnold’s ‘sweetness and light’. T. S. Eliot, for example, who refuses to give a definition of culture, but prefers to offer notes towards its definition, means by it what the anthropologists mean; that is, a way of life of a particular people living together in one place. He adds significantly, however, that though this culture is made visible in their social system, their habits and customs, their art and their religion, it would be a mistake to think that it consists of these. Similarly, Raymond Williams accepts the view of culture as ‘a whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual’.

At first sight, such a conception may seem far too vague and general to be useful, when we are considering culture in relation to an institution like the grammar school. In fact, there may be some who will be surprised to learn that it is possible for someone who is closely concerned with the grammar school to think of culture as anything other than the traditional notion of the cultivation of perfection, and of the graces of learning and gentility. There are indeed, in the grammar school, many who think that to be educated and to be cultured are identical terms, and in a sense this is, of course, true: it would be wrong, however, to say that it is impossible to be cultured unless one is educated in the accepted sense of that word.

Surely, in any complex society, it is inevitable that different cultural levels should emerge, if only because there are differences in intelligence, in insight and in responsiveness between its individual members. In this country, so far, the class system has limited the opportunity of many to aspire to the higher cultural levels, and it does not become the more fortunate minority to scorn those who have had fewer chances in life. Eliot thinks that, in an ideal culture, there should be a gradation of cultural levels, in which each person participates at the level appropriate to himself. Those at the top, so to speak, will have a more conscious culture and a greater specialisation of culture than those below, who will be more unconscious of their culture. The miner will differ from the artist, but in a healthy society they will both have a culture in common which they do not share with people of the same occupation in a foreign country. This common culture is based upon their language and literature, which implies thinking and feeling in common, and on their attitudes and pre-dispositions, many of which are below the level of consciousness.

What is clear, however, is that most of the major cultural advances in history have come from small groups of creative, dedicated persons. F. R. Cowell has pointed out that it needs considerable capacity and energy even to formulate and understand the cultural tradition: it requires very much more to reshape and to add to it. Great intelligence and insight are as rare at one extreme, as great stupidity and mental deficiency at the other. Most of us are somewhere in the area between these two extremes, able to follow but hardly able to lead, though we must remind ourselves again and again that in our society there has always remained a great deal of undeveloped potentiality. The mass of men tend, then, to follow cultural standards set up by a creative minority, but a long way behind and a long time after. However much our fellow countrymen may disagree about political and religious matters, about Association and Rugby football, about the merits and demerits of television programmes broadcast by the BBC or ITV, yet the majority of Englishmen share a common respect for law and order, and a belief in democratic values. They insist on the right of the individual to express himself freely so long as, in doing so, he does not interfere with the rights of others. They expect a tolerant attitude towards the peculiarities of other Englishmen. All these, I take it, are aspects of their common way of life which we call their culture, even though much of this is more assumed and taken for granted than discussed and thought about. In so far as there is a cultural élite in our society, it exists in this context: it has no right to look down upon the rest of mankind as lesser breeds without the law, and still less must it attempt to impose its standards upon others. The leading scientist, the outstanding sculptor, the philosopher and the religious leader will each go ahead with his own work, doing his best to communicate with other men and women, but leaving them to accept or reject what he produces. In a civilised society, cultural standards must be dynamic not static. It is particularly important that there should be no cultural authority with the power to establish and fix standards, and so prevent development and progress. The innovator and the traditionalist are equally valuable in a community which is prepared to test all things and to hold fast only to what is good.

I do not find it difficult, then, to accept the view of culture as a whole way of life, granted that in a given society we may expect there to be many different cultural varieties and levels. I cannot sympathise with those who work for the establishment of a common culture throughout society, in which everyone has the same standards and purposes. This conception seems to me one which constricts rather than one which liberates, and I can see no reason why there should not emerge a plurality of cultures, existing side by side in the same community. One argument against this is based on the danger, apparent enough in this country today, that such cultural differences may be entangled with social distinctions. I can see no reason, however, why the existence of different cultures should inevitably provide an occasion for social discrimination, even in this class-ridden country.

Since Richard Hoggart published The Uses of Literacy in 1957, it has become fashionable to base discussions of culture on the class hierarchy which emerged from the industrialisation of Britain during the nineteenth century, and to think in terms of a working-class culture and of middle-class values. This post-Marxist diagnosis has been pushed much farther by the disciples of Hoggart. In his fascinating and valuable book, Hoggart set himself the task of describing working-class culture as it was in a northern industrial area, when he was growing up in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and the changes which have come about since then. His conclusion is that the influence of the ‘mass publicists’ has been in the direction of destroying much of ‘the urban culture of the people’ which still existed in the ‘thirties, and that we are moving towards a mass culture. Hoggart says ‘the old forms of class culture are in danger of being replaced by a poorer kind of classless, or by what I was led earlier to describe as a “faceless” culture, and this is to be regretted’. It might be added, too, that Hoggart was concentrating particularly on the printed word and that television is not even mentioned in his index. The powerful and almost universal influence of this medium of communication must surely reinforce his conclusion and lead us to believe that working-class culture is rapidly disappearing and is becoming a thing of the past.

It is appropriate to add that Hoggart’s picture of working-class culture is deliberately limited by his own partial exclusion of what he calls ‘the purposive, the political, the pious and the self-improving minorities of the working class’. A different picture might be painted of working-class culture in some parts of Leeds, even when Hoggart was growing up: this would emphasise the importance of the chapel as the centre of the activities of a group of families, and there is a distinct suggestion that the chapel played its part in producing social mobility: certainly many of the families which were prominent in its life seem to have ‘got on’. Here again, after thirty years, there appears to have been a considerable decline in the importance of the chapel: its ‘culture’ is becoming submerged beneath the mass culture which surrounds it. It would be quite easy, too, to show the importance of the trade-union and of the ‘Co-op’ as a centre of working-class culture in northern and midland industrial areas at this time, to point out how they, too, were connected with the process by which families moved up in the social scale, and to find a similar falling-off in prominence today. Could it be that one important difference between 1930 and 1960 is that education has replaced other agencies as the chief factor in bringing about social mobility?

For my own part, then, I do not find it easy to regard working-class culture as playing any significant part in the life of the community today, though there are local exceptions and some vestigial remains. The brass band, pigeon fancying, the potent attractions of fish and chips are still with us; clogs, shawl, knur and spell have almost gone. In general, Light Programme, ITV, cinema, the popular Press, mass-produced advertisements and magazines are victorious, and local influences are giving way everywhere to national tendencies. The same forces are affecting the middle classes in precisely the same way, and are blurring the distinctions between working-class and middle-class attitudes and values. There are many people, indeed, who find it impossible to distinguish between working-class and lower middle-class.

Are these conceptions, too, rapidly becoming out of date? One result of technological change has been to produce an increase in non-manual employment: there are many more office and clerical workers. As industrial organisation becomes increasingly complex, there is a great need for men and women with technical and administrative skills. Society needs to employ far more people in insurance, banking, local government, the civil service. There has been a vast expansion in the distributive trades. The Registrar-General’s divisions of society into five categories, professional and administrative class, clerical, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers no longer appears particularly helpful. In the economic, as in the cultural field, the boundary line between working and middle class becomes increasingly difficult to find. Is there not a tendency to feel that we are all middle-class these days? At this moment in time, therefore, it is misleading and unhelpful to talk of a middle-class culture and of working-class values, without some attempt at close definition, and without remembering that the conceptions themselves are becoming out of date and are vanishing before our eyes.

The best attempt I know at such a definition appears in The Uses of Literacy. Hoggart points out here the importance of social solidarity, of ‘togetherness’ in working-class life, and of the influence of home, family and neighbourhood. He emphasises the self-respect, the stoicism and the tolerance of the working man. He shows a distrust of political life and politicians, and of established Christianity, a strong belief in fate and luck, a determination to concentrate on immediate pleasure and susceptibility to conformist group pressures. I have already indicated my view that this picture of working-class culture as it was earlier in the century is an incomplete one, and that it is, in any case, out of date today. What remains to be pointed out is a tendency towards a romanticisation of the old working-class values and of the so-called ‘organic society’ which existed before industrialisation set in. The myth of the noble working-man has replaced the earlier one of the noble savage. There must always have been something limiting and frustrating about working-class culture, even as described by Hoggart, and it is fascinating to find the heroine of Wesker’s play Roots achieving maturity by escaping from the cramping influences of her working-class background—‘it does work, it’s happening to me, I can feel it’s happened, I’m beginning, on my own two feet—I’m beginning’.

It is notable that those who tend to romanticise the working classes make little attempt to define with precision what they imagine middle-class values to be. An attack on social snobbery, comments on acquisitiveness and excessive individualism, sneers at pretentiousness and pomposity hardly do justice to such a vast subject. Indeed, I doubt the usefulness of even attempting a definition, because it seems to me that the expression middle-class covers such a vast area of British society that generalisation becomes impossible.

Our society is, indeed, in a state of flux, and the traditional class differences seem to be disappearing quickly. It is possible, I think, to detect the gradual emergence of three cultural groups, which for convenience I shall call the Establishment (not that this is particularly new), the Intelligentsia and the Majority (I do not admire this expression, but use it because of its comparative neutrality). The Establishment needs only a brief description: prosperous, orthodox, Church of England, public school and conventional Oxbridge, middlebrow. Its members might be expected to read The Times, the Sunday Times, The Spectator, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, to appreciate the West End theatre, to be baffled by the modern movement in the arts and architecture, to be both Conservative and conservative. They hold a great number of important positions in the community and have a long tradition of service. Their ranks are continually augmented by those who have achieved success through their education or their financial, commercial and industrial activities. This is the group which regards itself as divinely appointed to rule, and regards any interference with this right as an interruption in the workings of the law of Nature.

The Intelligentsia has emerged since the First World War largely through grammar school and university (very much including Oxbridge), though many ex-public school boys and self-educated people are to be found in its ranks. Its members have escaped, equally, from the stuffy conventionality of the middle-class and the stifling and limited working-class background. They might be expected to be interested in the arts in general and the modern movement in particular, and to read The Guardian, The Observer, the New Statesman (though they will find, in at least one of these, occasional infuriating remnants of travel, fashion and educational snobbery—witness the fashion correspondent who, in May 1962, implored her readers to buy their shoes in either Rome or New York). A strong element in this group is scientifically educated: many will be humanist rather than religious, and it is likely that there will be a considerable questioning of orthodoxy in the sphere of morals, politics and the arts. An experimental attitude towards life in general and an agnosticism about received values are typical. If there is to be found in this country a cultural élite, in the sense to which T. S. Eliot refers, this is presumably it, though many of its characteristics can hardly meet with Eliot’s approval. To a large extent, the Intelligentsia exists outside social class: it points towards the classless society imagined and hoped for by liberal idealists for many generations.

Popular, Majority culture, with its influence which pervades all levels of society, presumably needs little detailed description. It is a commonplace to read anguished attacks on the influences of television, cinema, radio, the popular Press, cheap magazines, advertisements, football pools, hire purchase and the low standards of the popular entertainment industry. It has become fashionable to deplore the commercialism of the ‘candy-floss world’, the worship of the new-fangled, the cynicism, the escape from life, the soggy romanticism, the concentration on sex and on violence which are so obviously found in the majority culture. Hoggart himself summarises it all when he says ‘we are encouraging a sense, not of the dignity of each person but of a new aristocracy, the monstrous regiment of the flat-faced’. Raymond Williams, looking at the matter from the angle of those who control these communications points out that ‘control of the new forces passes to men who are not interested in the growth of society, or in the human purposes the expansion is serving.… Instead of a new culture emerging, a synthetic culture will be devised for a quick sale’.

Modern inventions like television and cinema have not created low standards: they have merely revealed how low existing standards were. The new techniques contain within themselves the promise of improvement in the future: they are themselves neutral. Everything depends upon who controls them, and the use which is made of them. There are encouraging as well as discouraging tendencies. If it is important to spread far and wide the knowledge of some new agricultural technique, the most effective method is to show its use by a favourite character in The Archers. Popular television programmes can do a great deal to undermine a fear of hospitals, and to spread understanding of the nature of mental illness and of psychological treatment. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that a successor of Z Cars might make a positive contribution to more satisfactory attitudes towards crime? Mass society is not seeking culture but entertainment, but the boundaries between these are not always sharply defined.

There has been a great increase in the reading of ‘better’ newspapers, periodicals and books: the tremendous proliferation of paperbacks has brought within the reach of thousands works of great literature and books of quality in all departments of human knowledge. A similar development has taken place in the use of public libraries, colleges of Further Education and that valuable institution the Village College. Even small towns can boast of their musical and dramatic societies: any large town will show a remarkable blossoming of cultural groups, hobbies and leisure-time activities. A significant proportion of films, and of radio and television programmes, are valuable, which is as much as could have been claimed for the novels written in the nineteenth century. Good repertory theatres are more than holding their own (some of them are even achieving a new home): audiences for concerts of classical music, ballet, opera and good jazz are bigger than they have ever been. An increasing number of working-class families now own cars and take continental holidays: more and more of their children are staying at school to 16, or are obtaining admission to the grammar school and going on to higher education. A typical case is that of a working man, with a son at the local grammar school, who heard a broadcast discussion about careers and higher education: he suddenly came to the conclusion that his son would be robbed of his rights if he did not go to University.

Any division of society into cultural groups, like that attempted earlier, is in a sense arbitrary, and there is a great deal of overlapping, with nothing clear-cut and defined. The same person will be found with a foot in at least two of the camps: many of us who like to think of ourselves as members of the Intelligentsia are greatly influenced by the popular culture, and the contrary is equally true. It is appropriate to indicate the particular importance of the grammar school at this point, since it is very much concerned both with the emergence of the Intelligentsia and with the border-line between that group and the Majority. Its task is a very difficult one on that particular border-line, and also because it is much involved with the new teenage sub-culture which has grown up so rapidly in the last decade and has had widespread effects across the boundaries of the traditional social classes.

In one sense, the attitudes and leisure-time activities of the teenager represent merely a special case of the popular majority culture. Young people can hardly help being influenced strongly by the mass media of communication, and provide a profitable market for those who wish to sell pop records, magazines and films. With their great spending power, they offer an easy target for the ing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. What do We Mean by Culture?
• 2. The ‘First-Generation’ Grammar School Boy
• 3. Curriculum and Teaching Methods
• 4. General Studies in the Sixth Form
• 5. Authority and Freedom in the School
• 6. Religious and Moral Education
• 7. Out of School
• 8. Leaving School
• 9. Culture and the Grammar School
• Appendix 1. Billy’s Genius: a short play
• 2. Freedom and Reform in the Sixth (A note on the General Studies Association by its Hon. Secretary, R. Irvine Smith)
• 3. Curriculum Reform
• Bibliography
• Index