Boring old things

We would not be a reflective society if we didn’t argue about what children should be taught in schools, and how. Imagine the unimaginable: that we all agreed what the school curriculum should be. That could only be the case in a rigid autocracy.

So, I am all in favour of educational disagreements, and the heartier the better. There are too many skills with which we would like to equip young people and not enough time to do it all. Something has to go. But I did shudder when I read (let’s assume correctly reported) that there was pressure from a Professor of Social Mobility to cut school visits to museums and theatres in favour of visits to football stadia. Museums and theatre were just too middle-class. I see where this is coming from. I rather sympathized with him when he said that lessons and exam questions that referenced skiing holidays and rocking horses (really?) might be a bit exclusive. And I am sure that many kids could benefit from understanding how a football stadium works, even though tickets to a big game are always a lot pricier than the theatre or (often free) museums. But are we really saying that a visit to a museum is an activity only for the posh?

Maybe some school museum or gallery visits are less than perfect, and maybe some are counter-productively deferential to the works of art on display. But for the most part they are opening up perspectives, not closing them down. They are bringing kids face to face with real things and asking them to look at, and question, how we see the past, and why it matters. They are not exercises in veneration. Interestingly, I am told (it’s hearsay, but from reliable sources) a significant number of those kids bring their parents back, after a school visit, to see what they have seen. In other words, school visits to museums promote diversity up the generations not just down. I am sure much the same goes for the theatre.

Children outside the British Museum | © Philafrenzy, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Anyway, who really thinks that museums should be a privileged-only zone? In a world in which we want children (and all of us) to interrogate the media more carefully, to learn to recognize and to face down fake news, history, the art and the literature of the past are both more important than ever. With fake news and viral misinformation in mind, the new Education Minister has promised more courses in “critical thinking” at school. Fair enough. But the fact is that we have already got those courses: they are called “English” and “History” (learning to read novels is a very good way of learning how to read, better than learning how to read tweets). And that kind of “critical thinking” also happens when kids come face to face with complicated and contested objects in museums.

I am afraid that at the bottom of this is the shibboleth that old stuff is boring and has little to tell us (and why should kids be interested?). The truth is that how we make sense of ourselves depends on how we see the past, and we need to be able to look it in the eye, and not be intimidated by it. Those processes often start with a visit to a museum.

The post Boring old things appeared first on TLS.