Education Minister Bridget Phillipson wants to make our schools engines of ambition and social mobility. Good for her. Unfortunately, some of the the advice she has received as to how to do this demonstrates one thing more than anything else: when it comes to class prejudice, it’s earnest bourgeois reformers who habitually head the pack.
Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility, has told her that the answer lies in schools’ downplaying of middle class institutions. Out with visits to museums and theatres and references to skiing, jam-making or house-buying, which the underclass can’t connect with. And in with football club tours, graffiti workshops (local culture, don’t you know) and lessons about the Jarrow Crusade and Charles Dickens’s social activism (‘to remind our latest generations of the past accomplishments and struggles of working class communities’).
As for high culture like the theatre or classical music, whisper it quietly, but they might even like it
In a sense this radical suggestion isn’t surprising.
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