Quality | 2009.08.26
The revolution starts with ballroom dancing lessons | Lynsey Hanley
By widening our personal lives in ways that often defy class expectations, we can also challenge outdated social structures
A month or so ago I had the privilege of watching a group of teenagers, all of whom were secondary students at an academy in east Lancashire, try to avoid treading on each other\'s toes. They\'d signed up to take ballroom dancing classes, run by a company called Essentially Dance, at the most self-conscious, approval-reliant juncture of their lives, and were now having to show off their new moves in public. In so doing they proved that the bravest thing you can do is to try something new.
What\'s the betting the boys\' first thought was that they\'d get it in the neck from their mates for daring to have a go, and that the girls would be terrified of making fools of themselves? Their faces alternated between grins and cringes even as they danced. Yet something, or somebody whose opinion they were prepared to respect, told them that putting their short-term cred in danger would have long-term benefits, not least since it\'s been revealed that one in six people aged 16 to 24 are now Neets, or someone Not in Employment, Education or Training .
For Neets die young: in one study conducted in the north of England , 15% of those under-25s reported to be out of the educational and social mainstream by not being in work or at college in 1999 were found to have died only 10 years later. That, one might argue, is the price of social short-sightedness, paid by individuals in the form of boredom, dependence and depression followed by an early death.
In a perverse way, it could also be the price of adopting ignorance and despair as a life strategy. We have the power to shape our own lives within conditions over which we have little or no control. We know, particularly from the work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of The Spirit Level , that lives are limited – in length and in quality – by poor education, persistent poverty, social class, the wrong postcode, low status, peer pressure and stigma.
Yet each of us colludes, knowingly or otherwise, in upholding the present structure of things, through denying our own power to change the way we do things. Here\'s a case in point: until fairly recently, burdened by youth and chips on both shoulders, I used to say things like "I\'ve got no interest in travel" and "I hate red wine". I consented to appear on national radio saying that I "hated" classical music. The truth is that I knew hardly anything about it, but I found it in some way frightening and so felt the need to reject it. The alternative, of course, is to be rejected by a social group whose norms you have yet to become acquainted with. Best not to try joining in the first place. Once I truly listened, and learned, I realised that it was me who had the problem, not the music or the people associated with it.
Now fully embourgeoised, I love travelling and wine – even red, it\'s true – and listen to Radio 3 habitually. But why did I ever think it was a good idea to affect a lack of interest, and even hatred, towards things I knew nothing about and had scant experience of? My life has been enriched and improved every time I\'ve allowed myself to encounter something new and have given myself the time to learn to appreciate it; yet the legacy of past experience, ruled by the assumption that certain activities "weren\'t for me" means that I haven\'t done it nearly often enough.
The point to make is this: we are both free in ways we often cannot comprehend, and bound in ways that are far beyond our strength as individuals to control. We make and remake our part in the social structure every day just by being who we are and not thinking too much about it. Those who find themselves dropping out of school without a job to go to most often lack an incentive to think about their place in the world and an opportunity to challenge it.
Individuals within stratified social groups come to preoccupy themselves with ensuring that there is continuity and conformity within the group rather than challenging the structure itself. To do so they must deny themselves the power to do things differently, to experience the world in a new way. It\'s a means of keeping people broadly equal within the social environment you know, and it involves making a virtue of ignorance.
The difficulty comes when the thought "I believe my life can be better than it is now" is interpreted by others as "I believe I\'m better than you". Discussing his recent play, The Pitmen Painters , Lee Hall argued recently that his subjects – a group of Northumberland miners who pooled resources to take art lessons in the 1930s – "were aspirational about high art. They not only felt entitled, but felt a duty to take part in the best that life has to offer in terms of art and culture".
Similarly, the sociologist Mike Savage \'s research into what constitutes the British cultural field – in other words, his study of who likes doing what – reveals rather a lot about the restrictive nature of sticking to what you know and damning what you don\'t. He found that cultural tastes and practices in Britain were closely tied to education, and through that, to class. No surprise there. But the results also showed that those who are younger, less educated and who did routine work tended to dislike and avoid things out of the realm of their experience, and to say so.
Professionals and managers – particularly the more solid, confident end of the middle class – were far more likely to say they liked certain foods, music and pastimes than they disliked them. There is the predictable middle-class bias towards classical music and the opera, but there is also a willingness to engage with culture across the spectrum.
Savage concludes tentatively that "the middle classes are increasingly attracted to omnivore taste, meaning that the divide between \'high\' and \'popular\' culture is replaced by that between \'multiply engaged\' and \'disengaged\'." This is how class becomes a kind of caste; how cultural capital accumulates to those prepared to ingest the most culture; and how we end up unwittingly colluding with those who believe that the best things in life can and should only be appreciated by a tiny elite.
What prevents the would-be autodidact from learning, and living a richer life as a result, is the fear of getting it all wrong, and, essentially, being laughed at when you\'d rather hold on to the illusion of dignity. Knowledge is only power if you\'ve got the confidence needed to use it – which means taking the risk of treading on your partner\'s toes.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/18/class-neets-culture-access
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