‘…the best that has been thought and said…’?
This quotation from Matthew Arnold (question mark is mine) from his 1869 book ‘Culture and Anarchy’, has been interpreted by many (some say incorrectly) to mean that everyone should have access to the knowledge of the best of human culture; it is probably the best-known pithy definition of ‘Cultural Capital’ we have.
The French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, was the first to use the term ‘Cultural Capital’, borrowing the word ‘Capital’ from Economics to argue that like material wealth, valuable knowledge is a kind of capital.
E.D. Hirsch talked about ‘Cultural literacy’ instead of cultural capital but meant essentially the same thing: the need to ensure that all children and young people are exposed to a common core of high-quality knowledge that will enable them to function at a high level in society.
Ofsted became interested in cultural capital during their reworking of the Education Inspection Framework that was published in 2019. Under a section title, ‘Cultural Capital’, they say:
As part of making the judgement about the quality of education, inspectors will consider the extent to which schools are equipping pupils with he knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life. Our understanding of knowledge and cultural capital is derived from the following wording in the national curriculum:
‘It is the essential knowledge that pupils need to be educated citizens, introducing them to the best that has been thought and said and helping to engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement’.
Ofsted have clearly borrowed from Matthew Arnold. I confess that I’m not entirely clear on why they talked about ‘knowledge and cultural capital’ as if those two things are separate; they aren’t, because cultural capital is high-quality knowledge – back to Matthew Arnold’s the best that has been thought and said.
‘Cultural capital’ consists of important knowledge that it is useful for everyone to know. Over the past twelve years, the Government (certainly Michael Gove and Nick Gibbs when they held power in Education) have banged on about cultural capital and schools offering all pupils a ‘strong academic core’, by which they essentially mean the subjects included in the National Curriculum at Key Stage 3 and the English Baccalaureate at Key Stage 4 – this is the policy-making end of the Cultural Capital debate. What should be considered ‘the best that has been thought and said’? And who decides? These are fair questions, and bitterly debated, but not up for debate, surely, is the need to enable children and young people to learn many important things, and to be able to use that knowledge to function at the highest levels of society. To be clever, because they know a lot of important things. I like David Didau’s reference to the philosopher Michael Oakeshott (quoted in ‘Making Kids Cleverer’, 2019):
‘Knowing what is considered culturally important and powerful allows children to have a richer, fuller life; to take part in a community of ideas. As the philosopher Michael Oakeshott famously said, ‘…we are the inheritors, neither of an enquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries’.
No doubt it is possible to get by in life without accessing rich seams of cultural capital, but through schooling we are aiming to help children and young people to flourish, and this includes helping them to get cleverer, both at school and throughout their lives – having cultural capital helps with both of those aims. Knowledge is power, but not all knowledge is equally powerful.
