John Astley 'Young people, culture and having their own power'

I was delighted to watch again recently the Nicholas Hytner directed film version of Bennett’s play ‘The History Boys’. The play is set in a Yorkshire school and focuses on a small group of talented pupils preparing to move on to higher education. Their literature and humanities teacher, Hector, extols the virtues of taking a broad look at life and learning in their process of acquiring knowledge, constantly telling the pupils to ‘pass it on boys, pass it on!’.

In my experience, academic life can tend towards a focus on learning more about less and less, rather than imaginatively explore wider horizons of the value of what we learn and know. Putting all that to some valuable purpose.

In my recent piece for the Journal, ‘Young people, opportunity and consumerism’ I discussed the many restrictions placed upon the opportunity for young people to obtain a wider view of their development, and to gain access to meaningful choices. In this article I want to say a little more about this, focusing on the way the specific aspects of culture that people can, and often do, shape their lives through making culture.

In considering this I am reminded of Paul Willis’ 1990 book ‘Common Culture’; put simply, Willis is saying that young people do have a vibrant, creative and valuable diversity of culture. They are engaged in a wide range of social processes creating (making) and using for their own purposes cultural and artistic products. This is the material meaningful basis to their life.

Of course this is related to identity shaping and expression. It is certainly political as is any self-conscious action which creates a distinctive and semi-autonomous culture and which expresses an interpretation of the world, everyday life and our place in it, drawing on symbolic forms like music, fashion and the wider arts, is political. Not the least of this is undeniably about the assigning of value to cultures, and crucially the allocation of often scarce resources in society. There are therefore ‘turf wars’ which I would call ‘sites, even sights and rites of struggle’ about these things. What we all do is seek to have our own agency, the ability to exercise our power in making choices, having control, standing our ground on matters of principle, and often ideals.

We have often been told; certainly by the shallow lands of consumer advertising and life-style hype, that we are all the ‘authors’ of our own story. But, real life usually tells us that this myth is like ‘pie crust’, made to be broken. The ‘snakes and ladders’ of everyday life is often summed up in the words of Robert’s and

Fisher’s 1944 song ‘Into each life some rain must fall, but too much is falling in mine.’

There is always continuity and change, and these trends are invariably shaped by emerging ideas, while drawing on the past, and on cultural traditions. But, whose cultural history and memory are we discussing and prioritising? That is what generations of young people have often asked, one way or another. Most young people, and I was certainly one, are trapped to a certain extent in a history of their inherited culture and opportunities that they do not understand, and which often seems irrelevant to their needs.

When many years ago I wrote my book on the Beatles Phenomenon (how could this culture manifestation have happened?) I emphasised that many boys of my generation were engaged in a gender culture that was reflected in a pop music of ‘crushed male egos’. Work in progress I think.

Given the increasing cultural diversity of our times there are more opportunities for people to do their own thing, and have it valued, but there is still much to do.