Educating for the arts

I have been very fortunate in life. The greatest benefit of all was to have been born to two parents who loved each other and loved their children, and who were able to support their family to a decent and reliable standard of living. When I was a child, my mother worked as a shop assistant and later in a (pre-computer) clerical job. My father was a welder with Land Rover, first in Solihull and later at Garrison Street in Birmingham. Both were emphatic about the need for their two sons to be educated to the greatest extent of our ability. Many working-class families shared this drive for education and saw it as a way of ensuring that their children had a better life and more fulfilling work than they had experienced themselves. In my father’s case, an additional motive may have been his failure (at the final interview stage) to gain a scholarship for his local grammar school. He must have been keenly aware of how different his life would have been had the interview panel decided he was the ‘right kind of chap’.

This view of higher education as a means to a more prosperous life still predominates in England, both popularly and in government policy. The expansion in the number of university places is often presented as a means of improving the long-term productivity of the labour-force, while, at an individual level, enhancing the earning power of graduates. Neither argument is totally convincing. Productivity in the UK has been near-stagnant since 2008, despite the increase in the proportion of school-leavers going to university. Graduates do indeed earn about £100,000 more across their lifetime than non-graduates. However, this benefit varies greatly according to which course and which university people attend. There is also the possibility that some graduates would have boosted their earnings by a similar amount if they had chosen to take an apprenticeship or learn a trade rather than go to university.

Those actually doing the educating often have different ideas of what higher education is for. They usually love the subject they teach and have pleasure in seeing their students come to appreciate it. Students themselves often see going to university as the key stage in attaining adulthood, leaving home and often being based near the centre of a big city with all its cultural attractions. That was certainly my experience, moving from a dull suburb of Birmingham to a university in the very centre of London. For the first time, I saw a live ballet performance and attended a concert of classical music. I had already spent many hours in Birmingham Art Gallery on my way back home from school, but now I was able to visit the great art galleries and museums of London. In place of endless rows of detached and semi-detached houses, I could view the great sweep of Regents Street, and visit the Palace of Westminster, St Paul’s Cathedral and the surviving alleys of the City of London and the Temple. I had often gone to the local cinema with my parents, but now I could join the British Film Institute as a student member and see classic films from around the world.

You do not of course need to go to university to appreciate the arts. My father had a friend who worked with him on the Land Rover assembly line, who had a beautiful counter-tenor voice and performed in concerts. Another of my parents’ friend was an ardent follower of the Russian composer Scriabin. My wife’s father worked as a toolmaker and her mother as a hospital cleaner, but both had a deep love of music and ballet. Her father played the organ and attended the organ recitals by George Thalben-Ball in Birmingham Town Hall. Her mother took my wife to the Birmingham Hippodrome to see ballet performances. There is also widespread active participation in the arts. All round the country, there are many brass bands and other groups of amateur musicians, amateur choirs and amateur theatre groups. Most of these, however, are now in temporary abeyance because of coronavirus restrictions. People have been forced to drop participation in the arts for the passive receipt of mass culture via television and home computer.