Music in the 'Common' Life of the School: Towards an Aesthetic Education for All in English Girls' Secondary Schools in the Interwar Period
Title:
Music in the 'Common' Life of the School: Towards an Aesthetic Education for All in English Girls' Secondary Schools in the Interwar Period
Author:
Jacobs, Andrea Goodman, Joyce
Appeared in:
History of education
Paging:
Volume 35 (2006) nr. 6 pages 669-687
Year:
2006-11-01
Contents:
This article adopts a Bourdieusian and gendered frame of analysis to examine how the aesthetic education increasingly extended to the 'ordinary' pupil in English girls' secondary schools during the interwar period, and the music curriculum in particular, related to the reproduction of culture, class and gender for secondary schoolgirls. In a context in which access to secondary education for girls was widening and gender roles were being reconfigured in the aftermath of the First World War, the increasing stress on the aesthetic in girls' secondary education formed a means through which class was rearticulated in gendered form. The resurgence of Arnoldian views in the interwar period is traced in discussion of aesthetic education and music education presented by the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education and in deliberations of headmistresses around aesthetic education for girls, and particularly music education. The article looks at how Arnoldian views of culture played out in the music curriculum at the Mary Datchelor School, Camberwell, London, which was held up as the exemplar music curriculum by both the Board of Education and the Association of Headmistresses. The article concludes that the resurgence of Arnoldian notions of culture, and the stress on the aesthetic in interwar secondary education for girls, provided the ground for gendered class practices through which continuities of middle-class formation were realigned as access to girls' secondary education widened in terms of class. At the same time, 'music in the common life of the school' provided the space to contest traditional and gendered views of women's musical abilities and their exclusion from particular locations in the field of music. It also provided a space for an increasing range of girls to gain personal fulfilment through music, its creation and performance.
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