Page 36 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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20 Chapter 2 The ‘culture and civilization’ tradition

this scenario. First, it must carefully guide the aristocracy and the middle class from
such circumstances. Second, it must bring to the working class, the class in which this
so-called human nature is said to reside, ‘a much wanted principle . . . of authority, to
counteract the tendency to anarchy that seems to be threatening us’ (82). The principle
of authority, as we shall see, is to be found in a strong centralized State.
Why did Arnold think like this? The answer has a great deal to do with the histor-
ical changes witnessed by the nineteenth century. When he recommends culture ‘as the
great help out of our present difficulties’ (6), it is these changes he has in mind. The
‘present difficulties’ have a double context. On the one hand, they are the immediate
‘problems’ raised by the granting of the franchise to the male urban working class. On
the other, they are recognition of a historical process that had been in play from at least
the eighteenth century (the development of industrial capitalism). Arnold believed
that the franchise had given power to men as yet uneducated for power. A working
class which has lost ‘the strong feudal habits of subordination and deference’ (76) is a
very dangerous working class. It is the function of education to restore a sense of sub-
ordination and deference to the class. In short, education would bring to the working
class a ‘culture’ that would in turn remove the temptations of trade unionism, political
agitation and cheap entertainment. In short, culture would remove popular culture.
Against such ‘anarchy’, culture recommends the State: ‘We want an authority . . .
culture suggests the idea of the State’ (96). Two factors make the State necessary. First,
the decline of the aristocracy as a centre of authority; second, the rise of democracy.
Together they create a terrain favourable to anarchy. The solution is to occupy this ter-
rain with a mixture of culture and coercion. Arnold’s cultured State is to function to
control and curtail the social, economic and cultural aspirations of the working class
until the middle class is sufficiently cultured to take on this function itself. The State
will operate in two ways: (i) through coercion to ensure no more Hyde Park riots, and
(ii) through the instilling of the ‘sweetness and light’ of culture.
Culture and Anarchy informs its reader that ‘education is the road to culture’ (209).
It is, therefore, worth looking briefly at his vision of education. Arnold does not envis-
age working-class, middle-class and aristocratic students all walking down the same
road to culture. For the aristocracy, education is to accustom it to decline, to banish it
as a class to history. For the working class, education is to civilize it for subordination,
deference and exploitation. Arnold saw working-class schools (primary and elemen-
tary) as little more than outposts of civilization in a dark continent of working-
class barbarism: ‘they civilize the neighbourhood where they are placed’ (1973: 39).
According to Arnold, working-class children had to be civilized before they could be
instructed. In a letter to his mother, written in 1862, he writes: ‘the State has an inter-
est in the primary school as a civilizing agent, even prior to its interest in it as an
instructing agent’ (1896: 187). It was culture’s task to accomplish this. For the middle
class, education was something quite different. Its essential function is to prepare
middle-class children for the power that is to be theirs. Its aim is to convert ‘a middle
class, narrow, ungenial, and unattractive [into] a cultured, liberalised, ennobled,
transformed middle class, [one to which the working class] may with joy direct its
aspirations’ (1954: 343).