It’s partly because of this that Williams’ arguments remain especially relevant today.Ĭulture and Society is not a history of culture itself, but rather of the idea of culture. They also seem to ignore the far-reaching cultural and social changes of the past half century. They ignore the dynamic nature of culture, the way it is embedded in lived experience, and the fact that it is always contested. These arguments all presume that culture is contained in a fixed body of texts (or indeed facts) that can simply be handed on to the next generation. These ideas are reinforced by similar arguments about the need to re-introduce ‘knowledge’ into the curriculum (as though it had somehow disappeared) and by Ofsted’s new insistence on the importance of children acquiring ‘cultural capital’. This disadvantages working-class children in particular, by withholding what he believes is ‘the key to social mobility’: ultimately, poverty and inequality appear to result from a lack of ‘culture’. According to Gove, misguided progressive teachers have been engaged in a systematic attempt to deny children access to these things. Indeed, the influential former education minister Michael Gove has described education as a means of transmitting ‘the best that has been thought and written’ – an explicit reference to a book by Matthew Arnold called Culture and Anarchy, published exactly 150 years ago. Culture is seen as a fixed body of material that we inherit from the past and the function of education is simply to pass this on to succeeding generations. Re-reading them today, sixty years on, they seem exceptionally forward-looking and relevant – as well as more thoughtful and politically astute than much of the contemporary debate about education and culture.Ĭertainly at present, this debate seems entirely retrospective. These books appeared during a period of significant social and cultural change in Britain, which is in some respects parallel to our own (I’ve written about this period previously in relation to youth culture). In this series of posts, I want to trace some of these ideas in a trilogy of books: Culture and Society 1780-1950 (published in 1958), The Long Revolution (1961) and Communications (1962). These experiences raised questions about the relationships between politics, education and culture that were central to his early work in particular. At the start of his career, after a period of army service, he spent more than a decade as a teacher in adult education. Williams was born into a working-class family in a Welsh village: a promising student, he won a scholarship to a leading grammar school, and subsequently read English at Cambridge. Yet his ideas about education have often been ignored. He published a wide-ranging body of literary criticism and social theory, as well as several novels. Raymond Williams (1921-1988) is often described as one of the founding fathers of Cultural Studies. Revisiting three key texts, published sixty years ago.
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