What is high culture and examples?

"A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society", Roger Scruton wrote last year in the Guardian. "It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people."

As a teacher, the last part of this statement interested me because one of the aims of schools should be nurturing "educated people". Importantly for Scruton, an absence of "high culture is superseded by a culture of fake". This 'culture of fake' consists of many things, including false ideologies, opinions and expertise, but unfortunately for me, Scruton did not really identify what a 'low culture' could be.

In terms of teaching, learning and the curriculum, my dilemma is relatively simple, but not trivial; should I endeavour to reference high culture in my lessons so that students can appreciate cultural life at its finest, or, in order to engage students and make learning enjoyable, should I litter my lessons with references what might be perceived as low culture, which is probably best defined as 'pop culture' in the context of young people.

Pop culture would include just that; culture which is popular, easy to understand and entertaining to the majority of young people. For example, pop music, romantic Hollywood comedies and soap operas. High culture, on the other hand, may include renaissance art, classical music and opera. The latter is arguably more sophisticated, intellectually challenging and intrinsically rewarding.

To help get my head round this, I turned to the philosophical debate between high order and low order pleasures to see if I am genuinely in the business of creating 'educated people' or simply dumbing down the curriculum.

Moreover, this distinction is central to AS religious studies lessons I have taught on the moral philosophy of both Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. For Jeremy Bentham the approach to engaging and enjoyable lessons could be through referencing pop culture and thereby making learning more pleasurable. Bentham's basic idea is that pleasure is good in and of itself and that increasing pleasure is the right thing to do. In contrast, Mill argues that higher order pleasures are superior. This based on his consequential view that deferred gratification of pleasure will benefit the individual in the long run, as they will develop an appreciation of the finer things in life, such as poetry and classical music; what Scruton deems 'high culture'.

Mill and Scruton cannot be dismissed as academic snobs, as there is plenty of research on the positive effects of high culture and what is often termed 'cultural capital' on educational achievement, which is even recognised, albeit critically, by Marxist sociologists.

However, if I am to add educated people to society, can I really do it through referencing and advocating fine art, poetry, classical music and opera, or will this just switch the students off?

I feel that the infusion of pop culture into staid RE lessons has brought the subject alive and made it more relevant. For instance, my lessons have incorporated music from Alicia Keyes (Karma), a unit on medical ethics included readings and clips from My Sister's Keeper (saviour siblings) and Weird Al's I Think I'm a Clone Now (genetic engineering), and lessons on wealth and poverty have included games based around Supermarket Sweep in order to assess how altruistic students really are, if given the opportunity to grab what they want.

Relating Christianity to pop culture may be more fruitful, especially as Christianity is evident in hip-hop (Kanye West's Jesus Walks, for example), novels, such as the Da Vinci Code, and followed by a host of celebrities.

Of course, it is possible to unite the two categories of culture. My colleagues and I have planned lessons on heaven and hell that mixed clips from Tom and Jerry with Gustave Doré's illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy. Furthermore, lessons on the suffering include the literature from Elie Wiese and the paintings of Francisco Goya. And, essentially, there are multiple references to the King James Bible.

Despite these generous dollops of high culture, I would not dismiss the effectiveness of pop culture or, rather, low culture in the development of 'educated people'. There is arguably a creeping elitism among some policy makers concerned with education, but it is worth remembering that "a shared frame of reference" often centres on what is popular, and accessing it, even celebrating it, is a good way to initially engage learners.
Andrew Jones is head of religious studies and sociology at a community school in Hertfordshire and an experienced GCSE examiner.

Popular culture studies is the academic discipline studying popular culture from a critical theory perspective. It is generally considered as a combination of communication studies and cultural studies. Popular culture is the entirety of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images, and other phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century. Heavily influenced by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society.

In order to understand popular culture, we must first distinguish between what has been traditionally referred to as "high" and "low" culture. High culture most commonly refers to the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture. It is the culture of an elite such as the aristocracy or intelligentsia, and is contrasted with the low culture of the less well-educated, barbarians, Philistines, or the masses. Low culture is thought to encompass such things as gossip magazines, reality television, popular music, yellow journalism, escapist fiction, and camp.

The exquisite frescoes inside the Sistine Chapel illustrate an example of the "high culture" of the elite aristocracy of the times.

High culture became an important concept in political theory on nationalism for writers such as Ernest Renan and Ernest Gellner , who saw it as a necessary component of a healthy national identity. Gellner's concept of a high culture extended beyond the arts; he used it to distinguish between different cultures (rather than within a culture), contrasting high cultures with simpler, agrarian low cultures. Pierre Bourdieu, on the other hand, used a much broader, class-based, definition of high culture or "taste", which includes etiquette, appreciation of fine food and wine, and even military service, but also references different social codes supposedly observed in the dominant class, and that are not accessible to the lower classes.

Ernest André Gellner (9 December 1925 – 5 November 1995) was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist.

The definition of what constitutes popular culture - and where it falls within high and low culture - is frequently debated. Traditionally the term has been synonymous with low culture, denoting the education and general "culturedness" (or lack thereof) of the lower classes, as opposed to the "official culture" and higher education emanated by the dominant classes. However, this definition of popular culture has the problem that much "high culture" (e.g., television dramatizations of Jane Austen) is also "popular. " "Pop culture" is also defined as the culture that is "left over" when we have decided what high culture is. However, many works straddle the boundaries, such as Shakespeare and Charles Dickens.

A postmodernist approach to popular culture might argue that there is no longer a clear distinction between high culture and popular culture. The blurring of the boundaries between high and low culture is one of the main complaints made by traditional intellectuals about contemporary mass society. Among the first literary institutions responsible for this mix were commercial book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month-Club, appearing from the 1920s on. The book clubs were perceived as scandalous because they blurred some basic distinctions of cultural discourse, and dared to put "serious" fiction on the same level as detective stories , adventure stories, biographies and popular nonfiction. In essence, they created a space where high and low could meet.

The detective series featuring the character Sherlock Holmes, in its debut, would have been considered a kind of "low," or popular, culture.

Following the work of the Frankfurt School, popular culture has come to be taken more seriously as a terrain of academic inquiry and has also helped to change the outlooks of more established disciplines. Conceptual barriers between so-called high and low culture have broken down, accompanying an explosion in scholarly interest in popular culture, which encompasses such diverse media as comic books, television, and the Internet. Reevaluation of mass culture in the 1970s and 1980s has revealed significant problems with the traditional view of mass culture as degraded and elite culture as uplifting. Divisions between high and low culture have been increasingly seen as political distinctions rather than defensible aesthetic or intellectual ones.