Culture, Industrialisation and Education

G. H. Bantock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000288438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1968, Culture, Industrialisation and Education explores the cultural values that underlie the content of educational provisions and the way in which industrialisation and the mass communication characteristic of advanced technology have affected what is offered in schools.

The book puts forward the argument that the traditional curriculum, with its emphasis on cognitive and intellectual processes, is in many cases irrelevant to the needs of children whose futures are in occupations that do not centre on academic pursuits. It highlights the distinct lack of provision for these children at a time when a fuller and longer secondary education is being attempted for the whole population.

Culture, Industrialisation and Education will appeal to those with an interest in the history and sociology of education.

1
Education and the Cultural Dilemma

The meaning of 'culture'

The word 'culture' is normally used in two broad senses. It is used by anthropologists to refer to the total pattern of a society's life. The ways in which men co-operate or conflict, their social and political institutions, their taboos, rituals and ceremonies, their ways of bringing up the young, their shames and crimes, all are regarded as equally manifestations of the culture, trivial or profound. Used in this way, the word has no implications of value—everything reveals the culture, not just a few selected important details. The other typical use of the word 'culture', however, involves a high degree of selectivity. It refers to a particular set of skills, ways of understanding, modes of feeling and to the productions, scientific, artistic and practical which enshrine them. In this sense, a 'cultured' man is a comparatively rare bird, sophisticated, well read, knowledgeable. He pursues a way of life which is only possible to someone who has undergone a long period of education and who has become highly literate in the process. It is in this way that Matthew Arnold uses the word in his book, Culture and Anarchy; for there he defines culture as the 'best that has been thought and said', as something which leads us to our 'total perfection'.

In this book the word 'culture' is being used in a sense which lies between the two. I do not want to include everything in it because that would involve a number of trivialities; so it is applied selectively to important areas of human thought and action. But in itself it is not intended to imply anything about the value or quality of these activities and thoughts. In my meaning of the term, a folk song, a 'pop' song, and a Beethoven symphony are similarly representative of culture; for music plays an important role in human affairs and all three are equally examples of music. We might want to argue, further, that some are more valuable forms of music than others, but we cannot deny that all three provide us with examples of a culture in this sense. In the same way, cricket, the differential calculus, carpentry, photography, the dance or crime would also provide us with examples of culture used in this neutral way. To speak of 'a culture', then, in this usage, will be simply to refer to a number of important forms of human thought and behaviour without any distinction of value as between one manifestation and another, and to the pattern of their interrelationship. (This notion of interrelationship is important, too, for changes in one aspect of the culture—the development of scientific thinking, for instance—affects the rest.)

There is a further point about culture that needs stressing. Our culture, for good or ill, exercises a profound influence over us. It organises the way in which we learn to see the world in these important areas of our understanding. For instance, it provides us with a language which in itself helps to structure our attitude to the world. And the various forms of our culture provide us with pictures of ourselves, our society and the world of nature, in ways which we assimilate as we grow up. It should be obvious that a medieval man saw the world of natural phenomena in a way very different from that seen by modern man. Thunder once betokened the wrath of gods—it is now understood to be the product of a combination of purely natural events, and most of the terror it could inspire has vanished. When we think of different attitudes and feelings in this way, we see how important our culture is in providing us with explanations of the world we live in, and how it directs our attitudes and feelings as well as our ideas. Of course, we all add an individual and unique element to that understanding; but we are still very much at the mercy of what our culture teaches us about life.

Two cultures

Now, until the coming of industrialisation in this country, in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it has been possible to distinguish two broad cultures, using the word in the sense defined. There has been the culture of the upper classes based particularly on their ability to read and write. And there has been the culture of the ordinary people or 'folk', based largely on their traditions of oral communication. It is a pity that 'folk culture' even today, is still likely to summon up pictures of earnest middle-aged men and women performing staid versions of folk songs or Morris dances with breathy insistence; for of course the culture of the folk in times past had great strength and artistic merit.¹ It sustained a way of life which enabled people to come to terms with the rigours of their environment and the harshness of their economic position with courage and even gaiety. Of course, the talents of the folk showed great variety because there was no educational system to produce social stratification in terms of ability, pulling the ablest working-class children out of their environment and distributing them among the managerial levels of business and the professions. It was only the most outstanding who attracted the attention of patrons aristocratic or ecclesiastical; the rest expressed their abilities in the community of the folk, in the excellence of their craft work, song, dance, tale and creative assimilation of long-standing rural tradition. There is evidence to show that verbally many of them were more sophisticated than their urban counterparts today.² Westmorland yeomen, Miss Mildred Campbell tells us in her English Yeoman under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts, when engaged in a dispute over their tenant rights, declared that their landlords intended 'to pull the skin over their ears and bray their bones in a mortar . . . and when our ancient liberties are gone theill puke and poole and peele us to the bare bone' This vigour of speech indicates a direct sensuous awareness and a keenness of observation which stood them in good stead in their contacts with the materials of their crafts and the fantasies they translated into folk tale and song. They handle their 'fictions' with a stark directness which penetrates to the fundamentals of experience and reveals its patterns and textures. What they lack in psychological complexity they compensate for in the clarity and steadfastness of their vision; and they made their own culture within the traditions they inherited. The handing on in the oral tradition permitted individual contribution and embellishment. The village virtuoso added to what he received.

We must be very careful not to sentimentalise this culture or make it out to be greater than it was; at the same time, in saying this we must be equally careful not to dismiss its very real strengths. No doubt what has lasted and come down to us is not wholly representative—the best tends to survive; but what does remain is sufficiently remarkable to make it dangerous to condescend to the past. The people were sustained in their identities by a symbolism which penetrated all aspects of their experience and which they accepted as truth, that of the Christian religion.³ This provided them with images and moral categories of great emotional power, in terms of which they could interpret their lives; at the same time they could project their interpretations into sets of common symbols drawn from a common faith, which achieved immediate communication with their fellows. Religion, too, had its darker side in persecution and superstition; but it gave purpose to life. The folk were not original in the modern sense because the unchanging nature of their social lives easily translated itself into traditional patterns and well tried forms of communication; but they achieved a directness and forthrightness of utterance which compensated for the lack of novelty.

In thus praising the culture of the folk, I am constantly aware of the tension which exists between the virtues of 'rootedness' and 'emancipation'. The positive side of folk culture lay in its comparative stability; and from this 'rootedness' its moral strength was derived. Its fault lay in the narrowness, intellectual and emotional, it imposed on its superior inhabitants; such obscure Judes were often denied the 'emancipation' literacy could provide, and thus lacked fulfilment. To some extent the two cultures did interpenetrate, for both were sustained by a common symbolism and a common set of assumptions. 'Fine art,' said T. S. Eliot, 'is the refinement, not the antithesis, of popular art.' And so in fact it has often proved. Shakespeare and his predecessors of the Elizabethan stage transformed the popular tradition of the morality play; Purcell used folk music—in King Arthur, for instance; Scarlatti was much influenced by the flamenco. It was only in the eighteenth century when the Christian tradition was already under rationalist attack, that notions of 'politeness' and refinement gradually produced more rigid classifications, so that even the language used in writings was scrutinised for vulgarisms and indications of low origin. Of course, court and aristocratic circles often looked down on 'knaves that smelt of sweat'; and the higher classes were often unconscious of the particular forms of folk culture. Yet, paradoxically, the universal acceptance of class divisions made people perhaps less antagonistic to cultural levels different from their own, than they have since become. This is not to say that such different levels were not recognised; but they were not categorised as a hierarchy of 'brows'. This is possibly because they weren't felt as a threat to people with different cultural levels; nothing upsets people so easily today as attacks on their tastes.

Furthermore, it is important to realise that sophisticated or 'high' culture is utterly dependent on the general quality of popular culture; it cannot maintain itself successfully in isolation, for it depends on being nurtured by a lively and vital participation in less conscious cultural activities throughout the community; the greatness of Shakespeare was dependent on the vitality of the oral tradition which fed him and which was represented even in the verbal misunderstandings of a Dogberry. For cultural health in the community at large each element needs maintain its own cultural vitality in a manner proper to its interests and abilities, and in ways which need not necessarily depend on literacy. What is required is excellence at all levels, not an attempt to make all participate in the same culture. The development of scientific rationalism, accompanied by technical advance, undermined the comparative stability of these pre-industrial cultures. Once the emotional power of a common symbolism had been replaced by the sceptical analytic spirit of the freely ranging intellect, uninhibited by religious prohibition, bound to question more and more the assumptions on which the culture rested, a certain disintegration took place. Two signs of this were liberalism and romanticism; both asserted the atomic individual, his rights and his aspirations, against the common heritage of former 'truth'. As Sir Isaiah Berlin has pointed out in a series of recent broadcasts (Some Sources of Romanticism, Oct.-Nov. 1967), with romanticism the virtues of individual 'sincerity' were asserted against the claims of general truth. What tends to matter today (we still live in a romantic era) is not whether what a person thinks is true, but whether he believes what he says 'sincerely'. It is as if in the absence of commonly accepted standards of rightness all that is left is the integrity of the individual: it is for him to make his own separate peace with the demands of the 'real' world— except in matters where scientific standards prevail. Here we can know—the rest is opinion.

Scientific and technical development went hand in hand and led to industrialisation. This, too, had its profound effects on the disintegration of the old 'common' culture (defined in terms of the two interpenetrating cultures analysed above); and as it deeply affected the whole social structure and particularly the part to be played by education, I must examine its effects more closely.

The effects of industrialisation

Any major shift in human technical arrangements will inevitably involve altered patterns of work and relationship which will affect the whole culture. Let us look at the question of work, for instance. Work under pre-industrial conditions was often hard and unremitting; but a good deal of it was much more varied in scope than it is today. The craftsman selected his material, which often in itself involved a high degree of skill patiently acquired, and undertook most of the processes of manufacture himself, with the aid of his journeymen and apprentices. He was often able to plan his days to suit himself; and most important of all, because his tools were usually hand tools, he imposed his own human rhythm on the work. He saw and handled the finished product and was thus able to see the results of his labour, on which he had set his personal mark and for which he felt responsible. Whatever man has, he usually wants something else; and the idyllic nature of this picture must certainly not be overstressed—as I have indicated. There were discontents and quarrels, bad and drunken masters, Saint Monday and Saint Tuesday, when no work was done, a savage penal code, shocking ill-health; but there were opportunities too, such as George Sturt celebrates in his well-known book. The Wheelwright's Shop. The skilled workman knew by long practice, though he could not have articulated the distinction, 'the difference between ash that is "tough as whipcord", and ash that is "frow as a carrot", or "doaty", or "biscuity"'. There were the satisfactions 'which, of old, streamed into their muscles all day long from close contact with iron, timber, clay, wind and wave, horse-strength. It tingled up in the niceties of touch, sight, scent. The very ears unawares received it, as when the plane went singing over the wood, or the exact chisel went tapping in (under the mallet) to the hard ash with gentle sound.'

All this, of course, provided a type of education, one, perhaps, which produced unconscious harmonies through the strength of personal identity it produced rather than through conscious awareness. The young apprentices acquired not only skills but a pattern of life. But, as Sturt himself remarked, 'these intimacies are over'. The new ways have produced a higher material standard of living, better health, more leisure. But they have split the man between home and work, introduced the tyranny of the clock, profoundly altered the whole pattern of his relationships. changed the rhythms of his life. In his excellent book, The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson has chronicled the change-over from a domestic to an industrial economy and analysed some of the qualitative effects this has had on the lives of working people. When all allowances have been made for a slightly increased standard of living and for the undoubtedly darker aspects of the older way of life in England, Mr. Thompson is forced to refer to the process of industrialisation as, initially at least, 'an experience of immiseration'. And it was above all the loss of work status that drives him to this conclusion - 'long hours of unsatisfying labour under severe discipline for alien purposes'. Relationships altered - the distance between master and man increased immeasurably. The worker became a commodity, to be costed like other raw materials; he became an instrument, in that he had to submit to the rhythm of the machine. The notion of mutual obligation died, to be replaced by bargaining as the unions gradually increased their power. The cash nexus was all important, and money gradually became the dominating factor in the relationship of employer and employee. The freer rhythms of work under domestic conditions were replaced by submission to the factory bell or whistle, clocking in and clocking out.

Most significant of all, as industrialisation proceeded, more and more people had less and less to learn in preparation for their working life.⁴ Clearly, at certain levels, there was an expansion of technical knowledge required; but for the ordinary workman or operative the machine gradually replaced the skills he had formerly required, until, by the earlier twentieth century, with the implementation of mass production methods and the assembly line, many workmen simply filled in what the machines could not as yet achieve—to be superseded, in their turn, by the gradual development of automation. This role of the workman was explicitly recognised in the system of factory organisation known as Taylorism—the attempt as a result of the ideas of Frederick W. Taylor and Frank Gilbreth to work out the 'one best way', by which was meant the most efficient behaviour of the operative to help boost production. This meant rationalising the workman's actions with the aid of time and motion studies, and the effect was to turn him as nearly as possible into an addendum to the machine. Of course, since then, industrial psychologists have come to appreciate the harm done to human beings in this attempt to mechanise them; job enlargement, social benefits and greater opportunities for social intercourse have been devices by which they have attempted to break down the basic monotony of the work demanded. But the fact remains that much of what is done in the modern factory involves skills that can be acquired in an hour or two, or at the most a few days. We are far here from the 'niceties of touch, sight, scent'.

And, of course, this has all had its effects on the culture of the folk. For much of folk culture arose out of work or the relationships that work fostered. There were songs that were sung to the loom, or that celebrated direct muscular effort, like the sea shanties. There was the qualitative attention to the actual materials used in following particular crafts, and the discipline of eye and hand that 'working' it involved—as George Sturt indicates. There were the rustic crafts of the domestic economy which could occupy spare hours and enriched the pattern of daily living. With the coming of industrialisation, the cultural activities of the folk suffered a diminution. Urbanisation in the hideous nineteenth-century style abstracted the 'hands' from rural patterns of life into conglomerations of back to back houses; their understanding of country crafts diminished though, as Professor Hoggart points out, vestiges of the old rural pattern of life could survive for a time under working-class urban conditions. Nevertheless, as D. H. Lawrence saw, the time was coming when even the country man was becoming 'a town bird at heart'.⁵ The old rural culture was being eroded (industrial folk music shows a decline in quality), and was being replaced by a narrower life of political association in trade union. This may have helped to induce the sense of mutuality which apologists for the working classes are never tired of emphasising as the characteristic mark of working-class life in our own times; but the skills and the 'niceties' tended to disappear, to be replaced by working men's clubs, the benefit society and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. Education and the cultural dilemma page
• 2. The culture of the schools
• 3. Some aspects of popular culture
• 4. Conclusion