“If you don’t know who Mozart is how are you meant to, later on in life, take your rich client out for dinner and hold a culturally literate conversation?” This reductionist attitude to “cultural capital” makes me want to scream. Education isn’t about a dinner party checklist. https://twitter.com/DeanAKelly/status/1290906287329423365

This sort of example is always used — kids need Shakespeare so they don’t feel left out at high table at Oxford! They need opera for dinner party conversation! — and it perpetuates such a rigid and unhelpful attitude to cultural knowledge and experience.

And it pretends that we can simply skate over structural inequality and classism by getting poor kids to learn a list of things that they can use to pass through conversations with those who were brought up in more comfortable homes, rather than actually dealing with inequality.

It encourages a reductionist high culture / low culture division, and it precludes any actual engagement with that high culture for its own sake — why would Mozart be something people sought out as art if they’re always told that it is good for them?

I grew up working class in a house full of books & music, thanks. Sometimes I’ve been in conversations with posh people in academia & didn’t get a reference. But that isn’t want ever made me feel like an outsider. People don’t know things, sometimes! It’s fine not to know things!

Far better to normalise saying “oh, I haven’t heard of that”/responding to that sort of admission without being a dick, than telling children that knowing about Mozart is the only way to get ahead. (I have never had a conversation about Mozart in academia. Maybe not rich enough.)

I want all kids to have access to all sorts of culture — how else will they find out what they like? — but I hate this approach, to the extent that I’m largely suspicious of cultural capital as a marker at all these days (rather than social capital, which has actual meaning).