About high culture

Martin Fautley discusses the fraught issue of cultural capital, with specific reference to music education but what he has to say applies to all aspects of the arts, including the balance between knowing about an art form and actually doing it. At one point he declares: “we need to be on our guard against the creeping causality of high culture as panacea” which is true enough but in practice the tendency seems to be the gradual eradication of “high culture” from state education. The question is whether this is because teachers believe students can’t cope with it (see this, from a few years back) or that some of the teachers themselves might struggle.