More on the state of the nation, this time from Rupert, who suggests:

“I wonder if it’s more simply that knowledge has come to do with purchasing & selling it: that the idea of knowledge existing per se, as an abstract notion, has gone; and knowledge now resides in things - books, records, videos etc [which of course, are bought].

Neither defending that, nor do I like it, but that seems to me what has happened. It’s surely tangled up with the apparent state of the 'yoof of today' who think they don’t need to know/learn anything because you can always find out when you need to. One thing postmodernism does seem to have done is damage the idea of a certain kind of education, an awareness of processes [in the sciences], literary and general history, being the foundation for then going on to learn from. because there's a calculator we don’t need to know how to add up; because there’s online encyclopaedias we don’t need to know where countries are or the plot of famous/important novels - until we’re asked a question.

When we’re being kind we say people are learning differently, I seriously wonder if they are [and we may have to accept they don’t; and it may not matter]”

Carrie reacts to this with a possibly rightly snotty

“I’m still not convinced that people are all being as crap as we're saying they are. Who are these yoof? How do we know what they're thinking?”

To which I say, the majority of ‘yoof’ I teach day in, day out. And whilst I can’t be sure what they are thinking, I nevertheless get less of a sense of engagement with what they are doing now than, say, even five years ago, and whilst there are a multitude of factors in that, not least of which is the fact of what I do and how I might ’teach’, I can’t help but blame the contemporary popular culture (and their parents!) for making them this way. I’m talking specifically about 15 and 16 year olds here, who generally seem disengaged from learning, seem disengaged from leading productive lives and are instead more interested only in consumption. And this is probably as it has always been… I don’t really know. I don’t really know if I care much to be honest. Certainly not today, with a splitting headache after almost an entire week of teaching without break. And certainly of course I know several 16 year olds who are passionately engaged and so much smarter than I could ever have hoped to be at that age… And know too that I must sound like a boring old fart, and that’s just fine I suppose.

I suspect too that the UK schooling system is failing for a multitude of reasons, but one of which is that it is being neither realistic nor idealistic enough about contemporary cultural society, and the schools place in that culture.

I think Rupert is dead right about students not learning processes these days, or at least not having processes explicitly explained to them. I think in my own area about the ‘creative process’, which is a strange idea and hard to pin down, and I think, do we make it clear what the purpose of a task in fact is? How the individual task fits into the whole process? Do we give students the big picture? Do we illuminate that picture at regular enough intervals? And is that picture being reinforced elsewhere in those students’ lives?

The answer to the last question, I think, is almost certainly a resounding ‘no’.

Mike Schulman from the always ace Slumberland records recently said he was thinking about stopping making records because he was/is depressed about the current state of the ‘scene’, with kids, as he puts it “with no knowledge of any music more than 3 years old.” It’s that sense not necessarily of a lack of historical context so much as a lack of INTEREST in the EXTENDED looping and multi-threaded links between things both new AND old that in my view damns many contemporary cultural creations and their creators to being soul-less, vacuum-sealed to-go rubbish. They are like designed-memorabilia, with everyone with an eye on the ‘I remember’ shows a year or two down the line. Much of current culture, music particularly, seems to be locked in a loop of such little scope, referencing the past three years or so with little regard for any extended past, or any DEEPER substance.

It’s like the recent Channel 4 ‘100 Best Films’ show, about which Tim Footman tells me Nick Jones, head of film programming at Channel 4, said "We believe that this list represents what the public really like and is not the usual film buffs' list of titles most people have never heard of."

Which has the implicit statement that anything ‘most people’ might not have heard of is rubbish and that critics have no real sense of what is good or bad: that in essence good=popular and rubbish=unpopular.

Which is not only insulting for everyone involved, but also mightily depressing.

So I ask you all, fill a glass, and drink a toast to unpopular culture in all its dizzying depth and breadth.

Cheers.


posted by duke harringay at 7:35 PM

In a recent e-mail, Julian added the following to what I wrote last week:

'Bazalgate reminds me more of the TV exec in Jonathan Coe's 'What A Carve Up' or the attitude behind Sun journalists. I've watched and enjoyed some of his programmes, but I'm dissapointed that Sleaze didn't pick up and run with the point they only mentioned in passing; the guy is part of the genuine political and cultural elite in this country, and isn't this yet another case of the oldest right wing trick in the book - feed people shit and then blame the critics (the liberals / intellectuals / teachers / journalists) for not being good sports and ruining everyones fun. A bit more honesty, as in 'well we're not pretending it's anything other than entertainment but people enjoy it and you can't say fairer than that' might not go amiss, but . . . well isn't it also a bit like when the Institute of Directors complain that people don't mind musicians or footballers earning millions but never hold business people in the same regard. i.e. we have money and success so surely we must automatically have respect. And anyway, weren't the cultural divisions pulled down about 15 years before Bazalgate went to Oxford?'

Julian went on to say also that the issue of Sleazenation in question was depressing for its stance of colluding in commodification as a statement, and it strikes me that this is essentially the root of what I often think of as the cultural void of contemporary society. And who is fighting such things? It reminds me so much of the middle to late ‘80s when there were similar obsessions over such things as defining ‘lifestyle’ in very much consumerist terms. I seem to recall railing against it in a somewhat naïve manner at the time in the pages of cheap, scrappy, photocopied fanzines… perhaps now I will be doing it in the pages of a website? Maybe.

And in fact that makes me think about the Net, and the Web in general, and the public perception of it… It is now ‘marketed’ and hence perceived by many as a place where you can Buy anything you want, whereas I recall that even when I first went on-line six years ago or so, it was still perceived as a place to discover information, to explore ideas and create something exciting and, if not New, at least new. The march of technology and consumerism goes triumphantly onwards, squashing such concepts with contempt. And who has the strength to fight it? Who indeed.



posted by duke harringay at 2:18 PM