This article, published in The Guardian on Saturday 12th March 2022, references a study that suggests that visiting museums do not improve students grades. This may sound counterintuitive, but unfortunately, I didn't find this surprising at all. However the main assumption of the study and the article is wrong. It doesn't so much invalidate the concept of cultural capital, itself used erroneously and problematically by OFSTED, as much as it draws attention to the fundamental flaws of the examination system in the United Kingdom.
Why is the examination system flawed? for many reasons too numerous to even list here. But one of the most telling is that it is a system that is not rewarded by visiting museums. Museums are brilliant places and we should make every opportunity to visit them. I remember going on school trips to museums as a child, and, while enjoying it, realising that the visit would absolutely not help me achieve higher grades. Poking around the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, reading the descriptions and getting excited about the weapons with my friends, I knew that this information, as vital and as interesting as it was had no bearing on the extremely limited scope that the upcoming exams on the second World War would have. With the straightforward, regimented questions offered, there is simply no room for wider contextual reading, beyond a nod and a wink to appease the examiner and tick off a phantasmal Assessment Objective.
This is far from saying that museums are pointless, and lack educational value. They are wonderful places, especially for children, as they make difficult to conceptualize ideas concrete and physical. Learning in museums is vital and idealised and for many is the hyperreal embodiment of what learning should be. It involves being in a physical space, surrounded by artefacts that imbue history, and encourages active learning, the excitement of running around, picking out what best interests you, ignoring the rest, or perhaps saving it until a later date. It involves a process of mediation with the curator, and a negotiation with exactly how much you wish to engage: do you enjoy the Roman coins purely for their signification as artefact, or do you engage with the curatorial ideologies of cultural imperialism (or whatever it is that the exhibit is about?). Do you view these artefacts as a way of identifying with people and cultures long dead, or do you view them as taxonomic objects, facets of an ordering system? This is learning with the onus on the learner. It is exciting, rewarding, and complete anathema to exam assessed syllabi.
My own subject, A-level media studies, has taken something of a hammering in recent subject 'reforms', and while I should be frankly very grateful to still have a job teaching it, the shift from a subject that afforded so many freedoms to teachers to chose their own examples and case studies predictably shifted to a subject with extremely specific, prescriptive content. Previously, we were largely trusted to use our professional judgement and subject knowledge to select our own texts. While this was in many ways daunting, especially for non-specialist teachers, it allowed for very precise differentiation and to appeal to a range of learners. Now we have eight set industries, each with one or two highly prescriptive case studies, along with a 'theoretical framework' and nineteen prescribed theorists, all of whom are conveniently hacked down to a set of bullet points in the specification. So, for example, students do not need to know about Jean Baudrillard so much as they need to pay lip service to him. Many of the marks in the exam now come from demonstrating particularly accurate 'knowledge and understanding' on the form and structure of the magazines, TV programmes and film marketing campaigns we have studied, along with the ability, as ever to present a compelling point of view or argument relating to these texts. Such is the hyper-prescriptive nature of the mark scheme that any ancillary material must be treated with caution, merely referenced. And we are perhaps the luckiest of all the critical subjects. Sociology has been even more prescriptive for far longer. Psychology and sociology have been bizarrely shorn of their coursework, while we have been able to keep ours, allowing us to draw essential parallels between theoretical and practical working. However, it is extremely telling that every private school I know of that teaches media studies does not teach the new specification, but uses its privilege as an independent education provider to opt to teach the 'international' version of the specification, that essentially is identical to the much more open and liberal 2008 specification. Once more, private school children are offered something interesting and thought provoking, while state school children are forced to jump through the reams of rigid and dusty assessment objectives. This is not to say that I don't love my subject, and in spite of everything, I have worked extremely hard to take the specification and deliver it in a way which is interesting and challenging and encourages critical thinking. But it's certainly far more difficult to do so now.
According to OFSTED, museum visits are vital, not so much for their raw educational value, but because they imbue cultural capital. It is worth considering the etymology of this concept, which, like much Marxist terminology, appears to be in the process of being coopted by conservatives. Cultural capital refers to the hegemonic forces that exist to keep the poor poor and the rich rich, through the rules of distinction and taste that dominate bourgeoise society. For example, it is not enough to have money (monetary capital), but there are specific rules and regulations that exist as to how you should spend it. These rules are tightly safeguarded, and form a strict ordering system. Since this is rigid power, passed down through generations, it is not easily afforded.
This is very much indicative of the slapdash, woefully inadequate approach to education in England. Simply aping the paradigmatic features of cultural capital does not equal the acquisition of culture or social mobility. Quite the opposite; as Bourdieu argues, it is the performativity of these elements that affords them their power, and their exclusivity. You cannot just chuck working class kids in to a museum once a year and expect a panacea of social mobility. Doing so represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of cultural capital, as, by its very definition, cultural capital is not something that can be afforded, imbued or given. I myself grew up on a council estate. I was lucky. My career is resolutely middle class. My lifestyle is somewhat middle class. I buy classical music CDs. Yet none of these affectations have afforded me the benefits of a bourgeoise lifestyle. However, I suspect this misunderstanding is in fact deliberate and useful. Cultural capital here does not infer a productive engagement with the arts, but a nod towards monoculture. This reading suggests that there is a correct culture, a correct series of actions, that if followed, will magically afford social class. By ignoring the complex, performative nature of cultural capital and the processes of distinction, it perpetuates the illusion that there is an easy and straightforward way climb hierarchical structures (or in the government's own parlance, the cringey catchphrase 'levelling up'), when, in actuality, this process is as difficult as it ever has been.
So let's return to exams. If there is one fundamental issue with exams as a form of assessment, it is that it clearly does not assess what is actually essential and important. If regularly visiting museums does not increase the grades of students, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the exam system. The process of visiting a museum, engaging with exhibits and getting excited by history, art, nature and fashion should surely be linked to an increased grade in final exams. But they don't. Because exams do not assess joined up thinking or active learning. They assess assessment objectives, which are supposed to be ways of assessing learning, but are increasingly esoteric, joyless and pointless. The exam system in the UK must be overhauled and must be made fit for purpose. I suggest a robust system of internally assessed and externally moderated work. An emphasis should be placed on extended investigations, which can take the form of extended essays, multimedia projects, research and active, practical work. It's the kind of student centred work that places responsibility of students, with teachers modeling skills that are essential to both the workplace and further learning.
Traditionalists would surely balk at this 'soft' approach that does not resemble what they did at school, but if anything, this system would in many ways be more challenging for students. Student would have many more opportunities to stretch and challenge their learning, and actively be reared for it, rather than thinking of ever more complex and reductive ways of gaming the system to maximise success in exams. In fact, the whole process of preparing students for exams in analogous to the concept of metagaming, a process in videogames and traditional games, where players will utilise their knowledge of the systems of the game to break the game, rather than playing the game in an intuitive way that the producers may have intended. I often have existential crises where I wonder if I am preparing students to engage and challenge the media, or if I am merely preparing them to understand and to exploit the systems of the exam.
Exams have their place, and there would even be exams in my hypothetical system, though it would only count for a very small part of the overall grade, perhaps as little as 10%. Educators know that a holistic system of education and assessment that favours a range of assessment methods, that encourages discussion, research, independence and active earning is vastly more important and beneficial than a system reliant on an antiquated emphasis on summative assessment.