‘As if by osmosis’: How Ofsted’s new deficit model emerged,fully formed,as cultural capital

Abstract

This paper considers recent developments in English education policy as, confirming promises made in the 2016 White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere, schools are now to concentrate on the realisation of a knowledge-based curriculum, one that allows all students to ‘acquire’ cultural capital. First, the remodelling of Bourdieu’s concept, designed to explain class privilege, means that the cultural capital is now a mechanism for disciplining schools and teachers who fail to deliver the required curriculum. Second, in going beyond the social inclusion advocated by previous governments, this version of cultural capital has simply recycled the 1950s notion of cultural deprivation, turning it into a ‘knowledge deficit’ to be explained with reference to the work of ED Hirsch. It remains to be seen if ‘Hirsch-knowledge’ offers anything more than passive consumption of approved content, and the paper ends with a discussion of the implications for students of the new curriculum.

Introduction: Ofsted’s ‘knowledge curriculum’

In 2019, Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) published new inspection guidelines for schools and colleges in England. The importance of a knowledge-based curriculum had been emphasised in the 2016 White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere (Department for Education/DfE, 2016), but it was immediately noteworthy that the Ofsted (2019) guidelines declared that ‘inspectors will consider the extent to which schools are equipping pupils with the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life’ (Ofsted, 2019: 43, emphasis added). Media commentators (Ensor, 2019; Mansell, 2019) were quick to point out the misappropriation of a concept designed to explain how education reproduces social inequalities (Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990); but perhaps the emergence here of a reworked concept, one masking its origins, is of greater significance, and tracking changes in the language of education policymaking will show how Ofsted (2019) has simply reinvented cultural deprivation, a concept used in the 1950s and 1960s to describe the role played by family background in underachievement. A new deficit model now blames schools for failing to teach knowledge. Hence, in Educational Excellence Everywhere, ‘most challenging areas’ are those marked by ‘chronic, persistent underperformance’, explained by the absence of ‘high quality school place[s]’ (DfE, 2016: 19).

Second, the Ofsted (2019) wording (‘knowledge and cultural capital’) implies that cultural capital is distinct from the knowledge in question, whatever has been gleaned from the work of ED Hirsch, for whom the knowledge curriculum is defined in contrast to one based on the teaching of skills out of context. However, Young and Muller (2013) would also hope to distinguish between the knowledge of the powerful, which appears to overlap with Hirsch-knowledge, and powerful knowledge: as contested knowledge, the latter represents a quite different approach to organising the curriculum. Further, for Young (2010), knowledge in the curriculum should be distinct from the everyday knowledge students bring to school with them, whereas Hirsch’s (1987) cultural literacy frequently includes the kind of general knowledge that allows the individual, be they at school or not, to become a citizen. This paper, therefore, first tracks the reworking of cultural capital to produce a new deficit model and then considers implications for the school curriculum of the relationship this version of cultural capital has to knowledge.

Cultural capital: A research tradition

First published in 1964, The Inheritors (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979) begins with ‘the whole set of factors that make pupils feel and seem to be “at home” or “out of place” in school’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979: 13): socialisation in the family is ‘a sort of hidden persuasion’ leading to ‘an extensive culture, acquired without intention or effort, as if by osmosis’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979: 20). One’s at-homeness in the education system is effortless, class advantage presented as a personal quality, innate. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, first published in 1970, begins where The Inheritors left off by outlining symbolic violence as the attempt to impose meaning quite arbitrarily while disguising the very fact of power relations as the basis for that imposition (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 4). Hence, ‘[pedagogic action] seeks to reproduce the cultural arbitrary of the dominant or of the dominated classes’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 5). No learning, within or without the education system, can be seen outside of class relations.

This brief summary of The Inheritors and the opening of Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture shows how carefully the ground has been prepared for the discussion of cultural capital that follows (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 71ff). Subsequently, Bourdieu (1986) offers a more succinct description of cultural capital, now found in either the embodied state, as dispositions or attitudes, the way you feel; or the objectified state, as possessions; or the institutionalised state, as qualifications (Bourdieu, 1986: 243–248). What is now the embodied state returns the reader to the initial sketch of family-based pedagogic action in The Inheritors, and one can see links with, for example, Archer et al.’s (2003) account of the under-representation of working-class students in British higher education.

Not least, cultural capital is ‘recognised as legitimate competence’ (Bourdieu, 1986: 245). In school (or university or workplace), taken-for-granted assumptions about fairness and merit underpin all that we do; and the illusio, further, is ‘a tacit recognition of the value of the stakes of the game and as practical mastery of its rules’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 117). Participants in the education ‘game’ must imagine rules applying equally to all players, as illustrated by two recent accounts (Archer et al., 2018; Griffiths, 2018) of the experiences children in year 7 (the first year of secondary school in England) have of setting: first, there is a relationship between class background and setting and, second, attitudes to setting as fundamentally fair and reasonable, accepted as such even by the ‘losers’, make up a key feature of the idea of meritocracy in schooling.

Griffiths (2018) considers the experience of setting in a single school where children classified as ‘low-capital’ (from poorer backgrounds) nonetheless internalise the values of the school and accept the principle of selection by ability as fair; dissatisfied, ‘they [blamed] themselves for not being able to digest and understand the fare on offer’ (Griffiths, 2018: 54). Cultural capital in the embodied state feeds confidence and motivation, leading to judgements about self-worth; the individual accepts failure as natural. This is what Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) call symbolic violence, the concept central to Archer et al.’s (2018)large-scale study of setting. In the writing, Archer et al. (2018) report that year 7 children in lower sets (again more likely to be working class) have a negative view of setting. In fact, as the article itself shows, these children are discomforted by their own low status, which does not necessarily mean that they object in principle to setting as a way of organising schools. Having earned the right to be in a higher set, those promoted from lower sets are ‘more likely to accept the legitimacy of setting’ as such (Archer et al., 2018: 133). Even children remaining in the bottom set merely complain that hard work has not been properly rewarded (Archer et al., 2018: 134). Puzzlement here marks a lingering belief that the system is meritocratic and, inexplicably, something must have gone wrong.

Admittedly, these studies depend on the classification of students, based on family background, as high/low capital (Griffiths, 2018) or middle/working class (Archer et al., 2018). However, such classification produces ideal types that do not necessarily apply in quite the same way to all individuals: one of the bottom-set children quoted by Archer et al. (2018: 134) is Nissa, described as middle class. Nonetheless, such indicators might be said to underpin a deterministic view of class background as fate; so one might add, as examples here, Clancy’s (1997) autobiographical account of the difficulties faced by the graduate who, having enjoyed success in education, makes the transition from a working-class background to a career in middle-class academia; or Friedman and Laurison’s (2019) analysis of the reproduction of privilege in elite professions.

Other research has attempted to escape determinism by considering the experiences of working-class students from minority ethnic backgrounds (Basit, 2012; Scandone, 2018). Here, parental support, a key source of cultural capital, is based on a recognition that educational success is important in the face of racial discrimination. Cultural capital and class background should be judged in relation to other relevant factors. Nonetheless, for the individual from a minority ethnic background, this aspirational capital (Basit, 2012) might be countered subsequently by an ethnic penalty when the successful graduate seeks employment (Lessard-Phillips et al., 2018; Madood, 2012). Here, cultural capital is inseparable from social and economic capitals (Bourdieu, 1986); and the disadvantages faced by working-class adults in elite professions (Friedman and Laurison, 2019) is replicated by those from minority ethnic backgrounds.

From Bourdieu to Ofsted: Cultural capital as entitlement

In the studies discussed above, cultural capital is tied to family background and works with both social capital and economic capital to underpin class advantage. To deny the importance of what has happened before the child attends school is to ‘[make] the school career a history with no pre-history’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 43), leading to the ‘the ideology of giftedness’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 52). The ‘controlled mobility’ of a few means that they are not representative of their class (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 54). There is no assumption here that the group is homogeneous, and any determinism attributed to the theory is weakened if not all individuals are treated similarly or respond similarly to the experiences they have undergone. However, Ofsted (2019) ties cultural capital to meritocracy and social justice (Fordham, 2015: 56), ignoring Bourdieu’s embodied state and reducing the objectified state to, at best, curriculum content, with qualifications (the institutionalised state) highlighted as the desired goal of education quite independently of any role that might be played by social or economic capital.

Further, Ofsted (2019) fails to clearly define cultural capital as anything beyond what all students should be able to expect from school. At the outset, Ofsted (2019: 41) defines curriculum as ‘the substance of what is taught with a specific plan of what pupils need to know in total and in each subject’; it ‘[should set] out the knowledge and skills that pupils will gain at each stage’. Pupils should ‘build their knowledge and … apply that knowledge as skills’. Further down the page, ‘knowledge and skills’ are defined as whatever ‘pupils need in order to take advantage of opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life’. Hence, ‘[the curriculum] can powerfully address social disadvantage’. A couple of pages later, ‘inspectors will consider the extent to which schools are equipping pupils with the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life’ (Ofsted, 2019: 43). Cultural capital is here simply an alternative to skills in combining with knowledge to ‘address social disadvantage’.

Subsequently, in summarising what should happen, Ofsted (2019: 45) says that pupils must ‘develop fluency and unconsciously apply their knowledge as skills’; learning, it transpires, is more than ‘simply memorising facts’. At this point, one might observe that, in Reproduction, it is only towards the end of the first chapter that Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 57–58) reach ‘the work of schooling’ as a ‘specific regulated process’ of [pedagogic work]’; whereas, for Ofsted (2019), following Educational Excellence Everywhere, nothing precedes schooling. For Ofsted, ‘knowledge and cultural capital’ are also reduced to ‘the best that has been thought and said’; schools should ‘[help] to engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement’ (Ofsted, 2019: 43; see also DfE, 2016: 89), a reminder that, just appointed UK Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove (2011) insisted that ‘introducing the young minds of the future to the great minds of the past is our duty’.

Cultural capital, in this new, somewhat emaciated state, disembodied, at best inchoate, must now be provided – or delivered – as part of the curriculum. Rather than a zero-sum feature of a society, we might, in the name of social justice, be best rid of, cultural capital becomes something there should be more of (Major, 2015); and Hirsch-knowledge, a source for both Educational Excellence Everywhere and Ofsted’s (2019) guidelines for inspection, promotes cultural capital as a social good.

From Hirsch-knowledge to Ofsted: A new deficit model

Accorded celebrity status, Hirsch (2015, 2018) was invited to deliver lectures at Policy Exchange, with an essay collection, Knowledge and the Curriculum (Simons and Porter, eds, 2015), published to accompany his first appearance there. In the past decade, Conservative politicians (Gibb, 2015; Gove, 2009, 2013) have cited Hirsch’s work to give their policies intellectual respectability; the concepts of cultural literacy (Hirsch, 1987) or knowledge curriculum (Hirsch, 2016) have become common currency.

Speaking before he became Secretary of State for Education in 2010, Gove (2009) made no secret of his desire to promote Hirsch as a key thinker, citing Hirsch’s (1987) Cultural Literary and the ‘common stock of knowledge on which we can all draw’ (Gove, 2009: 4). Hirsch’s (1987) influence here is easily demonstrated when he suggests that the school curriculum should be ‘based on the national vocabulary’; ‘an agreed-upon, explicit national vocabulary should in time come to be regarded as the basis of a literate education’ (Hirsch, 1987: 139). The promotion of British values (DfE, 2014), moreover, is supported by Hirsch’s (2016) claim in Why Knowledge Matters that ‘[a] well-rounded constantly updated school curriculum that transmits the shared knowledge of the public sphere has always been the primary instrument of national unity and equal opportunity’ (Hirsch, 2016: 129). Here, as Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 10) would have it, cultural reproduction has been separated from social reproduction; and the function of education policy, arguably, has been to give greater prominence to the dominant cultural arbitrary.

Nonetheless, education policy’s debt to Hirsch fails to explain Ofsted’s (2019) adoption of cultural capital as a key term. Given that the ideas associated with Bourdieu are alien to Ofsted’s way of thinking, one might imagine that an alternative version of cultural capital has been derived from Hirsch; in Knowledge and the Curriculum, for example, cultural capital is mentioned ten times, as though the connection with Hirsch is obvious. However, this concept hardly ever features in Hirsch’s own work. In The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them (1999), a single reference to Bourdieu and cultural capital is surrounded by the repetitive use of ‘intellectual capital’ (Hirsch, 1999: 19–20) – repetition here would indicate that this wording is Hirsch’s preference, and intellectual capital, indeed, is highlighted in the glossary that closes the book (Hirsch, 1999: 256). Gove’s (2009: 2) reference to ‘our stock of intellectual capital’ would appear to be a citation. Elsewhere, searching for cultural capital on Hirsch’s website produces one cited reference (Core Knowledge Foundation, 2015) in a summary drawn from Calarco (2011).

Generally, Hirsch seems more interested in using capital (intellectual; knowledge) to produce an analogy: ‘just as it takes money to make money, it takes knowledge to make knowledge’ (Hirsch, 1999: 20) or ‘gain more knowledge’ (Hirsch, 2016: 165). This analogy is also found when Hirsch (2016: 81–83) discusses domain-specific skills and the difficulty of looking up information; the expert finds new learning easier than the novice, and the Internet, for example, ‘makes the rich richer’ (Hirsch, 2016: 83). With Hirsch’s focus usually on elementary (in England, primary) schools, his use of intellectual capital is designed to reinforce the idea that younger children can ‘catch up’ (Hirsch (2016: 166); the school can make good ‘[a] child’s initial lack of intellectual capital’ (Hirsch, 1999: 47). The implications for older students preparing for examination are less clear, as will be shown later.

There is, of course, no reason why Hirsch should engage with Bourdieu’s work; one must look elsewhere to explain Ofsted’s (2019) revision of cultural capital, effectively a return to assumptions about cultural deprivation prevalent in the 1960s (for a contemporary critique, see Keddie, 1973; see also Blackstone and Mortimore, 1994). The 1960s deficit model blamed the family and wider community for being out-of-step with broader socio-cultural values as represented by the school; whereas education policy now insists that the student in the classroom is merely a unit of learning to practise on, social disadvantage and poverty no more than opportunities for the engaged teacher. In Gove’s (2013) words, ‘[t]eachers give children the tools by which they can become authors of their own life story and builders of a better world’; and Educational Excellence Everywhere clearly shifts the deficit model from the (supposed) inadequacies of home background to the (supposed) inadequacies, currently, of what is taught in schools. If there remains a tacit assumption that working-class families might still produce children that cannot be taught, schools must promote the fiction of equal opportunities.

From cultural deprivation to cultural capital: Teachers’ views

By the 1960s, it was recognised that formal education had become more important than for earlier generations of young people. Where Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) described pedagogic work in the family as key to the maintenance of class privilege, the functionalism of Talcott Parsons (1962) insisted that school should produce meritocratic social rankings and also integrate the individual into an all-embracing value system. Cultural deprivation undermined this process of secondary socialisation.

Importantly, mainstream research sometimes subscribed to this version of functionalism. Douglas’ (1967) The Home and the School, for example, noted that some parents seemed uninterested in their child’s progress in primary school and were also less likely to take advantage of the available healthcare services. Such parents, however, were not uncaring; they did worry about their child’s health but were unable to make the obvious connections between healthcare, absence from school, and a lack of progress (Douglas, 1967: 82–83). On the other hand, those working-class parents who did encourage their child at school and did care for them well were said to have ‘middle-class standards’ (Douglas, 1967: 84). The Home and the School, moreover, is now striking for the ease with which, throughout, the validity of teachers’ views is not questioned. Similarly, discussing deviant behaviour in London secondary schools, Sugarman (1967) denied that teacher ratings of students were ‘seriously biased’ when producing conclusions that ‘a high quality home tends to go with low teenage commitment [to deviant behaviour]’ (Sugarman, 1967: 158); or that ‘the teenager role … appeals most strongly to boys from homes of lower intellectual quality’ (Sugarman, 1967: 159).

If Douglas (1967) and Sugarman (1967) accept teacher views at face value, Jackson and Marsden (1966: 217–219) do wonder if teachers are paying attention to the way grammar schools might contribute to working-class underachievement. Half-a-century later, the views of teachers as cited in these three studies are echoed by those at the school featured in Griffiths (2018): having used setting to produce an elite group of ‘good’ students, teachers here proceed to blame the victims of this system for their apparent unworthiness (Griffiths, 2018: 50–52). Elsewhere, Thompson et al. (2016) indicate adherence to a deficit model by some just entering the profession as student teachers. As Thompson et al. (2016: 218) point out, political rhetoric has been ‘a systematic attempt to obfuscate the realities of economic and social inequality by suggesting that in some way educational inequalities are separate from them’, and such obfuscation (DfE, 2016; Ofsted, 2019) has, arguably, revisited and renewed cultural deprivation.

Responsibility and the language of denigration

What separates 1960s cultural deprivation from the current reworking of cultural capital in Ofsted (2019) is the language of responsibility. Murray’s (1996a, 1996b) writing of an underclass, for example, highlights poor lifestyle choices: those who do not work or find meaning through marriage and traditional family life are ‘barbarians’ (Murray, 1996a: 42) or a New Rabble (Murray, 1996b: 115–118). However, if this language of denigration recalls that found in Sugarman (1967), there has been, generally, a shift in emphasis. In the 1960s, the social context would have included post-war urban renewal and an improvement in living standards as working-class families moved to new council estates (Douglas, 1967: 60–67); a distinction might be made, then, between satisfactory and unsatisfactory housing. For Sugarman (1967), the context would have included Parsons’ (1962: 114) fear that the peer group was ‘the area of greatest immunity to adult control’, perhaps an earlier version of Murray’s (1996a, 1996b) confident disparagement of lifestyle choices. Subsequently, the language of social inclusion, dependent on notions of individual responsibility and a downgrading (or ‘obfuscation’) of inequalities outside the school, would provide a basis for the knowledge-based curriculum and a new version of social justice in the form of acquired cultural capital. Inclusion simply reordered policy discourses to emphasise choice for both students and teachers (see Alexiadou, 2002). Making the curriculum ‘relevant’ in the interests of economic competitiveness meant that all students could succeed; social exclusion would be exacerbated by schools and teachers who failed to provide students with success (Alexiadou, 2002: 75–76). However, having established this key role for teachers, ‘skills-based teaching’ could easily be rejected after 2010 when arguments found in Hirsch (1999, 2016) were so useful in support of evidence-based policymaking: see, for example, Gove (2013) on ‘Ofsted’s tough new regime’ in relation to the wholesale adoption of Hirsch-knowledge. However, throughout this period, there has been an alternative to Hirsch-knowledge in the work of Michael Young; the rest of this paper will, therefore, discuss the curriculum implications of these different approaches to a knowledge-based curriculum.

Hirsch-knowledge in the curriculum: Compliance or engagement?

Central to the current discussion are distinctions, first, between knowledge of the powerful and powerful knowledge, and then, second, between specialised and everyday knowledge. Young (2010) distinguishes between a curriculum based on compliance’ (the Govian model), where ‘knowledge [is a] given’, and ‘a curriculum based on engagement’, where it is recognised that knowledge ‘has a social and historical basis’ (Young, 2010: 22). The difference is between passive (accepting, not questioning knowledge) and active (discussing what knowledge is for) models of learning. Further, the compliance model is a top-down model, what is meant by knowledge of the powerful; whereas powerful knowledge must be seen to earn its high status as ongoing scrutiny provides ‘objective longevity’ (Young and Muller, 2013: 243). If this sounds like Ofsted’s (2019: 43) Arnoldian ‘best that has been thought or said’, a curriculum based on powerful knowledge should include an awareness that knowledge is contested.

Further, powerful knowledge is specialised rather than everyday knowledge; ‘produced socially in particular conditions [it] cannot be reduced to those conditions’ (Young and Muller, 2013: 237). A good example is provided by Young’s (2010: 25) distinction between the city the student lives in (here, Auckland) and studying that location in geography lessons, where subjective experience should be replaced by theoretical concepts that transcend the personal (Young, 2010: 26).

Clearly, then, there is a world of difference between the notion of powerful knowledge and Hirsch-knowledge; at best, the latter, with its complacency regarding the checklist of useful information to be ticked off, sees learning as passive consumption. Cultural Literacy opens with ‘the network of information that all competent readers possess’ (Hirsch, 1987: 2), which then becomes names from history, for example, Stalin and Churchill, or ‘the relative chronology of major events’ (Hirsch, 1987: 8); or being able to recognise quotations from Shakespeare (Hirsch, 1987: 9), with a list of names helpfully provided later (Hirsch, 1987: 29–30). Such ‘information’ will translate differently into curriculum content at different stages; and Hirsch does insist that it ‘lies above the everyday levels of knowledge that everyone possesses and below the expert level known only to specialists’ (Hirsch, 1987: 19, emphasis in the original) – what used to be taken for granted as school knowledge. Nonetheless, cultural literacy would also include ‘quite a lot of vague knowledge about baseball’ (Hirsch, 1987: 15). Similarly, in Why Knowledge Matters, communication skills require ‘not just a big vocabulary but also a big range of irrational idioms and unspoken shared connotations’ (Hirsch, 2016: 80).

The UK Government, in promoting Hirsch-knowledge, is clearly interested in constructing a national culture, one that will require formal education to be integrative. This is the role for education outlined in Parsons (1962) and recycled in Hirsch (1987), and any distinction between cultural capital and cultural deprivation must be erased. There are no cultural arbitraries that can resist integration. Fordham (2015) is rare among the contributors to Knowledge and the Curriculum in acknowledging the importance of studying ‘disagreements … within the disciplines’ (Fordham, 2015: 60); it remains unclear if such ‘disagreements’ take the curriculum beyond compliance.

Further, the what-if of education, the unavoidable presence of the unpredictable, the unmanageable, must be acknowledged. For Parsons (1962), there was the wrong kind of peer influence; for Bourdieu and Passeron (1990), it was possible that not all individuals would fulfil their allotted roles, and the necessary regulation of teachers and teaching found in Ofsted (2019) was foreshadowed in the ‘routinisation’ described by Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 58–59).

According to Young (2013: 106–107), Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) fail to offer alternatives to the imposition of a dominant cultural arbitrary; hence, any tension between compliance and going beyond it has, he argues, been lost. However, Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) do allude to the possibility of non-compliance. If pedagogic work ‘tends to produce a permanent disposition to give, in every situation …, the right response’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 36, emphasis added), it does not necessarily follow that this tendency will prove successful: the distinction here between pedagogic work and physical constraint/repression suggests that the manipulation involved in pedagogic work is sometimes laid bare. The school drawing attention to itself as an agent of transformation is problematic: the education system ‘[abolishes] the happy unconsciousness of familial or primitive educations, actions of hidden persuasion which, better than any other form of education, impose misrecognition of their objective truth’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 62). Hence the possibility of ‘moments of crisis’ when there is conflict between school and family, parents asking by what right their child is exposed to a topic they consider controversial (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 62–63).

Consequently, in the space available, the final part of this paper will ask what compliance or engagement might look like. Discussion will focus on possible responses to the literary canon, chosen here because it features so prominently in Gove’s (2011) speech on ‘a liberal education’: ‘any society is a better society for taking intellectual effort more seriously, for rewarding intellectual ambition, for indulging curiosity’. There is a striking contrast between Gove’s ‘educated person’ and, for example, Gibb’s (2015: 16) ‘incremental accumulation of knowledge’ or an entitlement to literature summed up in Educational Excellence Everywhere as ’three Shakespeare plays’ (DfE, 2016: 89). The canon, representative of the dominant cultural arbitrary, demands compliance; how, then, might the student, by implication working for GCSEs or A-levels in England, or even at degree level, dipping into the canon in line with course requirements, respond to, or resist, prescriptions to do with cultural literacy and/or formal learning? More specifically, how might compliance and/or engagement relate to traditional definitions of ‘the text’ the reader must ‘respond to’?

Questions of agency and resistance: Apprenticeship

Gove (2011) replicates the shopping-list approach to cultural literacy (Hirsch, 1987: 28–30) and offers a version of the classical reading list provided by Hirsch (2006: 9); yet he fails to demonstrate why a reference to Pericles is more impressive than one to the Arctic Monkeys. It just is. For Young (2010), the topic has to be packaged appropriately for the curriculum; there is nothing that is intrinsically superior about one topic compared to another. There is no reason why studying the Arctic Monkeys could not feature within the specialised knowledge making up a curriculum based on engagement. Further, to simply regard the classical reference as ‘the mark of an educated person’, in turn ‘the noblest of ambitions’, raises the possibility that, without engagement, knowledge can be faked without risk of exposure. For the most part, Hirsch considers the elementary/primary curriculum as providing a foundation for success later; Gove, on the other hand, highlights a desired adult outcome, his speech exemplifying what Bourdieu and Passeron (1990: 209) call ‘merely a certification effect made possible by the ostentatious and sometimes hyperbolic length of apprenticeship’.

Hirsch (2016: 101) defines a domain as ‘any larger context into which the things being studied are integrated and connected conceptually and linguistically’; and it should be clear that the ‘larger context’ will be constructed differently at different levels of education. Arguably, the problem with popular culture is not that it is intrinsically inferior, but that it is seen to interfere with school-based learning. For Jackson and Marsden (1966: 116–118), homework conflicted with family life, the home a space that might struggle to accommodate school-related activity. Hirsch (1987: 20) shifts the emphasis in claiming that ‘[t]elevision watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework’: leaving aside the assumption here that media literacy is either a nonsense or irrelevant, domain-based learning is not only relative to the stage of education in question but also a way of rigidly defining what is in and what is out for the kind of apprenticeship Gove (2011) has in mind. The concept of domain, then, is central to the organisation of cultural arbitraries.

Where, then, is Middlemarch?

To demonstrate briefly how the concept of domain-based learning might soon become problematic, consider the example of Middlemarch, which Gove (2011) insists ‘should be part of the mental furniture of many more of our fellow citizens’. But Middlemarch is a 900-page text that requires the investment of time; the most enthusiastic apprentice, watching no television at all, would find it challenging to have to study too many novels of this length for, say, an undergraduate course. Similarly, it is unlikely that this novel, which might indeed be recommended, would be required reading for GCSE or A-level students. As a cultural phenomenon, however, it does perfectly illustrate the problematic nature, nowadays, of any attempt to police boundaries between the revered text and its possible circulation in popular culture. For Middlemarch has been adapted for television and radio, and an abridged audiobook version (a mere seven hours as opposed to the full-length 30+ hours) also exists to be exploited by the apprentice aiming to cut corners. There are, moreover, many ‘study guides’ available, in print and online, at the very least reducing knowledge to content that is easily lifted (Bach, 2014: 273–274). Do these adaptations/representations provide an acquaintance with the text that would satisfy the criteria for cultural literacy, which does not have to be specialised? Does cultural literacy now mean that the apprentice becomes a tourist sending a postcard from each location visited as evidence they have been there? Study guides, replacing the classroom teacher, might also provide scaffolding to more legitimately ‘supplement’ reading and therefore support students preparing for examinations at different levels (Bach, 2014); but how far should ‘the educated person’ know Middlemarch better? How to prove that they are not faking it? One might add that the part publication of Middlemarch (1871–1872; for a summary of the novel’s publication history, see Frost, 2016: 3–23) resembles the way in which one might now experience a television series; the novel’s location within nineteenth-century literary culture is far different to its current positioning as a canonical text. As a signifier of learning, then, any canonical text must soon start to become elusive: where is the object to be singled out as suitable for inclusion in the curriculum?

Conclusion: What, if anything, has changed?

Political rhetoric (DfE, 2010, 2016; Ofsted, 2019) promotes teaching as the methodical organisation of what those called students (or apprentices) do when they are not left to ‘discover’ meaning for themselves. If the attitudes of some teachers betray the survival of a 1960s deficit model based on home background, one should not ignore the virtues of asking all teachers to consider all students as potentially capable; yet one might ask if this has ever been the aim. Young’s (2010) distinction between compliance and engagement is key: a compliance curriculum tells the student their culture outside the school is invalid, which is why Ofsted’s (2019) version of cultural capital merely recycles cultural deprivation while, somewhat slyly, insisting that all students are entitled. By way of contrast, a curriculum based on engagement seeks to demonstrate that all knowledge has to be tested: the distinction is not one between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ knowledges but between the reification of knowledge and a discussion of how any knowledge becomes worthy of study.

Whether or not any particular knowledge-based curriculum involves compliance or engagement on the part of students (or, indeed, teachers) must remain open to question; resistance does not have to take the form of a refusal to produce work. The example, above, of possible responses to a nineteen-century canonical novel shows that candidates for exam certification can always find ways to succeed, enjoying an acquaintance with the ‘original text’ through its reproductions and adaptations. Having reduced the goal of schooling to the consumption of approved content, education policy has failed to go beyond compliance, that is, doing what you are told to gain the approval indicated by a good grade. By definition, a canon handed down through the generations (‘the best …’) is not fallible knowledge but reified knowledge. The reader of Middlemarch or any other novel might well ‘get into’ the secondary literature; but nothing has changed insofar as assessment is based on end-of-term examinations to provide certification: as an example of cultural capital’s institutionalised state, qualifications are, supposedly, a valid record of student achievement, but also one of the ways in which teaching as what teachers do is always judged.

What, then, has changed? Pedagogic action reproduces both dominant and dominated cultural arbitraries, and the knowledge-based curriculum organises compliance with that very distinction, Gove’s (2011) ‘noblest of ambitions’ likely to be realised by few: this matters little insofar as the workings of an illusio means that, just as children accept the ranking imposed by setting, the citizen of a Govian meritocracy will accept their experience of a small number of texts, cultural capital in its objectified state, as their worth. Ofsted’s (2019) version of cultural capital remodels cultural deprivation with the aim of inclusion as a means to ranking, that is, as a means to disguising ongoing exclusion.