De-Institutionalization of High Culture? Realized Curricula in Secondary Education in Flanders, 1930–2000

Abstract

Based on findings and suggestions originating from educational research, several cultural sociologists have claimed that the education system has contributed to the erosion of the institutionalized character of fine arts throughout the 20th century. However, empirical research to substantiate this claim is scarce. We focus on secondary education in Flanders to study the centrality of high culture. Our goal is twofold. First, we want to reflect on the ways the education system can – via the process of institutionalization – infuse certain cultural products with status. Second, we offer an exploratory analysis by studying whether the extent of institutionalization of traditional high culture in the education system has decreased over the course of the 20th century. Our analyses indicate that, in the period 1930–2000, both high and low cultural forms are increasingly being represented in the school context. However, we find that the increase of high culture is especially situated in the academic track – the most prestigious track, designed to cultivate the future elite. In this way, throughout the 20th century, the education system continued to channel high culture to the upper social strata of society, thus infusing these forms of culture with status.

Enter Culture, Exit Arts?

“…Overall, these observations suggest that there are no clear, unambiguous signs of the dissolution or 'deinstitutionalization' of highbrow arts' legitimacy (DiMaggio, 1991;Daenekindt and Roose, 2015). Moreover, these observations highlight the need for empirical and, most importantly, longitudinal analyses, to shed new light on cultural legitimacy and processes affecting it over the last decades from various angles.…”

“…curricula, professorships, etc.) but also through ceremonies and museums, as well as canons, prizes and criticism (DiMaggio and Useem, 1978;DiMaggio and Mukhtar, 2004;Daenekindt and Roose, 2015). Additionally, their prestigious status as a potential cultural asset or a high-status signal is widely recognized (Lamont and Lareau, 1988).…”

“…Politics and the role of culture in a wider socio-historical context Introduction What elements shape cultural hierarchies throughout time? While studies on cultural stratification have widely emphasized the importance of the rise of new consumers of culture, whose range of taste is significantly wider due to new values that highlight the importance of openness, tolerance and omnivorousness (Peterson and Kern, 1996;Bennett et al, 2009), and the role that institutions (including newspapers) play in providing a framework to rank different cultural goods (DiMaggio, 1991;Janssen et al, 2008;Daenekindt and Roose, 2015), there has been substantially less work focused on the ideological contexts that may also help to shape such hierarchies (see, however, Cvetičanin and Popescu, 2011;. This is not strange once most of Western Europe and the United States have enjoyed liberal democracies where freedom of press was guaranteed by the nature of the political system, helping to spread ideas, fashions and tastes among different audiences of society with barely any interference from public powers (with the exception of public funding).…”

“…by focusing on how symbolic value has been institutionalized and built in the form of prizes, higher education curricula or public funding), it remains to be an exciting topic for future research to systematically investigate in different contexts whether and how the popularized discourses on traditional highbrow arts have had an influence outside of the evaluative discourses themselves, by tracing the 'deinstitutionalization' of highbrow arts' legitimacy (cf. DiMaggio, 1991;Daenekindt and Roose, 2015).…”

“…School curricula (e.g. Daenekindt and Roose, 2015), pop-charts (e.g. Verboord and Brandellero, 2018), elite catalogues (e.g.…”