Page 130 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

In search of a ‘good mix’ 123
places for churchgoers and nine for non-churchgoers [. . .] it was one
of anti-slavers, it’s got a perfect tradition really and I would like him
to go to a church school, and I certainly didn’t [go to one] when I was
abroad, but there is a lot of emphasis based on religious education which
I think is really important because some of the culture is tied up with
art and history to do with religion. There is a big gap if you miss out
on that, and I think that it’s really good to have some kind of moral
code. Parents who aren’t necessarily religious at home but they support
the values, important from that, I think they need so many boundaries,
kids, it makes them feel secure, and it gives them something to rebel
against and I think its very healthy. I like their rules. Like learn to control
your temper! That’s a good rule! And they are very conscious of other
people’s… religions, needs and beliefs, and I would really like him to go
there I think it’s a good school. I would be very happy, and they are very
good on music too, which is very unusual for a primary school. Unless
it’s a private school which is completely different. They don’t just do
recorder, they have got an orchestra, which is very telling. They do a
lot of sport.
(Interview 17, emphasis mine)

There are various reasons that Deborah gave for her preference, including
the desire, like Teresa, for a ‘moral code’ and ‘boundaries’. This resonated
with discourses against ‘liberal’ or ‘trendy’ schools that had lost a sense of
these values and thus contributed to the degeneration of society. But, as
Deborah expanded on why she liked the school, this extended beyond its
religious nature to broader issues of cultural capital – art, history, sport and,
in particular, music. Deborah’s idea of culture was racialised and classed; it
was explicitly western and Christian and associated with ‘high’ culture. The
desire for children to learn classical music was mentioned several times in
the middle-class interviews. Frequently, these parents felt that their children
were musically ‘gifted’ and, therefore, they wanted schools that could sup-
port this. For instance, Stephanie explained that:

Um, there are quite specific things we look for, like we have a particular
interest in music, and my little boy seems to be gifted musically so we
want to know that there are good facilities for supporting that, enabling
that.
(Interview 11)

What is interesting here is the way in which the desire was expressed
more as a special need – for a ‘gifted’ child – rather than as a desire on the
part of the parents. Bourdieu, studying class and taste in France in the 1960s,
found that ‘nothing more clearly affirms one’s “class”, nothing more infal-
libly classifies, than tastes in music. This is of course because, by virtue of the
rarity of the conditions for acquiring the corresponding dispositions, there