Where this all started...There were articles in both the
Telegraph and the
Daily Mail about our new specification in Communication and Culture. They both took the same approach, that the new specification was an "A Level in being a teenager" and both journalists had obviously rung up Nick Seaton, from the Campaign for Real Education and put him on the spot for a quote, which he duly did, along the lines that culture was about great art, books and literature! Never! Click on Telegraph and Daily Mail links to read the original articles.
Here is Peter Bennett's response:
Dear Daily Mail,
How ironic that your ill-informed attempt to undermine the new Communication and Culture A level turns out to engage head-on with the debate that is central to the course: the issue of 'value' in our cultural lives. This article will undoubtedly be used by C&C teachers in order to articulate one position in this debate: put simply, that knowledge of "the war of the Spanish Succession' is without question 'superior' to knowledge of and experiences of Popular Culture. Other positions are, of course, possible.
As Chief Examiner and co-author of the new specification (and Chief of the current Comms Studies) can I perhaps, for the sake of balance, offer an alternative take. It is true that we, much to the frustration of your CRE spokesman, do not "concentrate on great literature, art or music". Rather we concentrate on the arguments made by various parties for these, and not other, cultural items, to be considered 'great'. In doing so we 'canvass' the opinions of such ‘lightweights’ as Matthew Arnold, TS Eliot and the founding father of ‘Communication’ the Late Raymond Williams, Cambridge don and Marxist Literary and Cultural theorist, whose seminal text ‘Communications’, published in 1962, set this particular ball rolling. For Williams High Culture was not always so rigorously defined: ”at worst the social elite translates the best into its own accent”.
The focus of the course is the ways in which we are formed and framed by the processes of socialization and enculturation: in the essence the ways in which we are shaped by all of the ‘meanings and practices of Everyday Life’. For the AS year the key concept is ‘Identity’, surely a focus for all ‘real’ education. For sixteen and seventeen year olds this inevitably will mean considering what being a teenager means to different people (including perhaps The Daily Mail): it does not mean they are doing “ an A-level in being a teenager”!
In choosing the one song lyric (Drifters) in a list of indicative resources aimed to support coursework on “the social and cultural rituals of cinema” you are seeking to play up the superficial at the expense of the academic. At least C&C students will be aware of the way evidence is selectively used by all of us in supporting our arguments: this again is integral to the course: it is ‘about’ perspectives and arguments. From the same list you might have chosen an article from the graver ‘European Cinema Journal’.
I really dispute that this revised version of a well-established A level (since 1976) is ‘controversial’ or that “critics are concerned it will lack academic rigour”. If these ‘critics’ are merely those for whom ‘real’ education equates only with ‘traditional’ education, then so be it. The current Communication Studies specification is very much a minority subject taught largely in elite sixth form colleges who find it a perfectly challenging course for their often academically gifted students. On this basis the new specification passed through QCA scrutiny without concerns of any kind. As for insisting that the "everyday is worthy of study", was it not Socrates who famously remarked that "an unexamined life is not worth living"
Yours faithfully
Peter BennettChief ExaminerA Level Communication and Culture Print Article-->
