Descending and condescending

When asked to name a British prime minister other than the present one or Mrs Thatcher, my young adult patients are inclined to reply, ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t born then.’ Such an answer would not surprise Frank Furedi, the author of this attack on cultural populism; it is the natural consequence of an educational theory that makes relevance to pupils’ pre-existing personal experience the touchstone of the curriculum. That this theory serves to enclose pupils permanently in whatever little (and unpleasant) world they might find themselves so little bothers the educational theorists that one might easily conclude that the consequence is an intended one. That is to say, it is a conspiracy by middle-class theorists against the working class, designed to keep the latter, individually and collectively, in its place at the bottom of the social pile.

In Professor Furedi’s view, the relentless drive to ‘inclusiveness’ in institutions such as universities and museums arises from the loss of the traditional cultural elite’s belief in its philosophical right or duty to remain an elite, coupled with a desire nevertheless to do so.