Quality | 2010.03.27
The cultured classes | Lynsey Hanley
The will to learn brings confidence, and the ability to view society through truthful eyes
The socialist paradise in which I\'m now sitting is a place where people from all walks of life, young and old, firm and somewhat less firm, have – through a combination of apprenticeship and self-examination – come to learn together about the world, without having to pay for the privilege.
It\'s a public library, of course: a place which you visit voluntarily in order to learn more things than you were taught at school. I call it "the place where dreams can come true". It\'s where the project of learning continues, at your own pace and of your own volition, and where you are understood to be an equal participant in the making and changing of your mind. No possibility is closed off to you.
Good fortune favours the well-primed, and the habit of seeing yourself as someone who doesn\'t do that sort of thing, or have that kind of luck, can be hard to get out of. But oh, to be a child in Newham now! The east London borough has just announced a policy of giving every pupil in its primary schools free music lessons for a minimum of two years, and the loan of an instrument of their choice. You can almost hear its mayor, Sir Robin Wales , rubbing his hands together at the thought of spending £1.25m a year making Every Child a Musician , as the scheme is known.
Knowing that my nan, who left school at 11, could play a bit of piano, whereas I barely know one end of the instrument from the other, proves that no skill is transmitted by osmosis. It has to be passed on deliberately, which is why progress can never be taken for granted, and why the invidious nature of cultural dispossession must be kept in mind.
It\'s hard to convey the sheer desultoriness of our music teaching at my secondary school. For a start, we were given one half-hour lesson a week, of which 25 minutes were spent trying to wind up the plainly contemptuous teacher. When she couldn\'t be bothered, she looked out of the window and let us get on with pressing the demo button on our Casio keyboards: playing at playing and learning nothing in the process because the person we needed to guide us didn\'t think it was worth her while.
This is shown more powerfully in 36 Children , Herbert Kohl\'s account of teaching in a Harlem elementary school in the late 1960s. He shows the children that they have brains when every other teacher has told them they\'re brainless. He invites them round to his apartment and puts on jazz music while they rifle through his books and artefacts. They quickly become fascinated by Greek myths and work together to produce a literary magazine full of allegory, truth and creativity.
Middle-class children are subjected to "accelerated learning" virtually from birth. The nascent person of power is treated as a sponge who can take it all in, because they\'re assumed to have the potential for discrimination and specialism later in life. Start with piano, violin, trumpet, ballet and chess club and you can always drop one when, as expected, you start to show exceptional talent in one or more of them. This enrichment of the domestic environment – turning home life into an extension of schooling – is taken as a given by teachers at largely middle-class schools, which stretch their children to the extent that excelling becomes the norm.
Note that accelerated learning programmes – or "wraparound schools" which start early and finish late, the better to fit more of these "middle-class" activities into the daily life of working-class children – are intended to do the opposite: to make school an extension of the home. However, the value of making educational activities something you do outside of school, as well as inside, is surely that you stop associating learning exclusively with schooling.
Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsman , writes convincingly of the role that learning to read and play music has in building confidence. Mastery is a transferable skill – once you\'ve mastered, or at least gained a working knowledge of, one thing, there\'s nothing stopping you from trying another. When my husband takes his Grade 8 exam in classical guitar next month he\'ll be 35, but that won\'t stop him picking up another instrument to learn straight afterwards (I know what he\'s like). Playing music gives him another kind of voice, and affords him a sort of enviable mental polyphony.
You can keep people down with this kind of power: the power to deprive, to impoverish, to make ignorant. But you can\'t keep them down for ever. At some point it will warp and blast out some other way, in bitterness, in fighting, in baying for blood, the consequences of having just enough knowledge to know you\'re ignorant. Learning is what enables us to look at ourselves and our society through more detached, more truthful, eyes. Who would deny anyone that?
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]sons-schools-cultural-learning
