Everything is in My Hands. Creative Subjectivities in Privileged Art School Students

Introduction

This article aims to study how privileged students develop aspirations at secondary art schools. Recent sociological research has found that social origins matter in creative occupations and that the art field is still a privileged arena (Brook et al., 2018). How do people from higher social classes choose artistic fields? Relatively little is said about the ‘artistic factory’ and its social dynamics. This contribution aspires to fill the gap with a very specific, and limited, focus on privileged young people enrolled in artistic educational pathways.

The main research question is about how class background affects art students’ orientation to education and career paths. There are several questions to explore. First, what happens in the ‘black box’ of secondary artistic education? How do the privileged young people shape orientations and expectations on creative fields? How do the forms of ‘privilege’ act on the ways of giving meanings to the future? How does the reproduction of class privilege intertwine with creative aspirations?

To begin with, a preliminary specification of the characteristics of Italian secondary education and, within it, artistic education, is fruitful. In Italian sociology, there is limited research on visual art schools (Paniccia, 1960). Similar to higher art schools in Britain (Banks and Oakley, 2016), secondary art schools in Italy allow disadvantaged pupils an alternative path, however their social composition is mixed. In addition, the trend is towards an expansion of the creative industries in the Italian economy (Istat, 2014, National Institute for Statistical Analysis), which points towards a potential correlation with the new characteristics of reformed art schools. This work directs its focus to upper secondary schools (age 14–19) specialising in a fine art and visual arts curricula. ¹ The upper secondary school system is made up of three types of school: vocational schools, technical institutes (which prepare students for the workplace), and ‘lyceums’ (which traditionally prepare pupils for university). ² Art schools are one of the lyceums. ³ Until a decade ago, there were two types of art school: vocational art schools and ‘artistic lyceums’. The ‘artistic lyceums’ focused on fine arts while vocational art schools were dedicated to craft arts. However, the ‘Gelmini Reform’ of the Ministry of Education (2009) transformed all art schools into lyceums and eliminated vocational schools with an artistic curriculum. The restyling of the artistic lyceum by reform has established new specialization curricula for the final three years of schooling, following common biennial courses in visual and figurative art, architecture, design, scenography, graphics and multimedia. ⁴ Today, art schools are the least prestigious lyceums due to their practical dimension. They lie outside the division between the theoretical dimension of the ‘lyceums’ and the more practical side of technical and vocational schools (Bourdieu, 1979; Willis, 1981). They are dedicated to the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility, which still presents ‘distinctive’ features (Ashton, 2015; Banks and Milestone, 2011; Brook et al., 2018; McLeod et al., 2009; McManus, 2006; Oakley et al., 2017) but art schools are also places in which pure manual skills are developed.

These characteristics raise relevant questions about the perpetuation of the class reproduction of educational qualifications and, especially, the role of arts within it. An increasing corpus of research explores the maintenance of class inequalities in creative professions, therefore there has been less investigation of the phases leading up to entry into the art field. The aim of this study is to address some considerations of this gap. In addition, the dynamics of social stratification in the creative sector have been covered extensively in European research but very few contributions regarding the Italian context exist: there are no relevant studies on class inequalities in the creative sector for Italy. Nevertheless, a little research on artistic intermediaries and cultural consumption reveals the existence of some class differences (Santoro, 2010).

This preliminary framework allows us to formulate critical questions about how privileged pupils interpret their academic experience and how they imagine their educational and working futures in Milan, which is the most important city in the Italian creative economy ⁵ (Allen, 2013; Ashton, 2015; Banks and Oakley, 2016; Burke and McManus, 2011; Coleman, 2017; France et al., 2019; Martin and Frenette, 2017).

Over the next pages, I will first summarise the sociological literature on social class differences. The focus will be on habitus and classed subjectivity concepts. I will intersect them with an attention towards neoliberal value systems. Second, I will present the empirical research characteristics before discussing the empirical data in two steps. The analysis of pupils’ educational lived experiences and future aspirations leads to a deeper examination on reflexive subjectivities. Finally, this examination identifies a specific classed neoliberal spirit. The proposed analysis suggests the need for new research on links between class belonging and the neoliberal ethos.

Theoretical Framework

The main reference is Bourdieu’s theory of action, and the concepts of field, habitus and cultural capital, here applied to an examination of the educational system (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964, 1970). In particular, the concept of habitus is crucial for the proposed analysis, to explore the dialectic dynamic between positions (socio-economic conditions) and stances (opinions and values) in the field. It indicates a level of underlying emotions, values, tastes and preferences, and the same feelings which define the Bourdieusian ‘sense of educational play’ (Gaddis, 2013: 3) and a ‘sense of the place’ (Bourdieu, 1979: 466). Habitus refers to a long and slow process of accumulation of a set of dispositions through daily life; a set of dispositions that orients individuals’ actions. It allows us to examine the link between necessity and possibility – and therefore between objective structure and subjective experience, between past and future – by interrogating perceptual and evaluative schemes in their dual role as products and producers of the social order. Habitus – as an amalgam of present, past and future – orients and predisposes, potentially, social agents towards certain choices and directions.

Moreover, over the following pages, the analysis of the relationship that students have with school leads to a questioning of the ways through which neoliberal values are incorporated into the individual classed subjectivities. ⁶ The issue of the relationship between subjectivity and neoliberal values is here explored in a Bourdieusian perspective; it is also based on research conducted by scholars such as Bansel (2007) and Nairn and Higgins (2007). It is necessary to specify how some of these works start from a late Foucauldian interpretation of the self that is understood as a contingent product which is constructed by the discourse. Basically, neoliberalism is understood as a type of governmentality of the self (Foucault, 2008): ⁷ a form of government that acts through the dissemination of values and orientations of competitiveness and entrepreneurship. The thematization of neoliberalism, as well as social agents and the nature of power, by Bourdieu’s constructivist structuralism, is very different from Foucault’s post-structuralism (Akram et al., 2015; Laval, 2017; Masquelier, 2019). Despite the epistemological and conceptual differences, we can take only some suggestions to go ‘beyond’ (Rehbein and Souza, 2015: 25) Foucauldian sociological literature through some of Bourdieu’s lenses. This is to explore certain dynamics of becoming on the neoliberal subject. This perspective stresses the relevance of people’s social condition to understand the dynamics of the functioning of power and is useful to explore how pupils interiorise neoliberal and class ethos. This is the path traced, among others, in works by Skeggs (2004), France and Haddon (2014), McRobbie (2011), Walkerdine and Ringrose (2006) and Ball et al. (2000), which allow class and gender dimensions in the neoliberal processes to problematised. Neoliberal society obliges individuals to be ‘free’, self-entrepreneurial subjects, but there is no uniformity. Nevertheless, this duty of freedom is unequally distributed across social groups. These works reveal how the realisation of self-making and individualisation tasks are deeply classed in contemporary society. The Bourdieu perspective, and the related literature, permits us to focus on the ‘making’ phase of the neoliberal subjects, addressing the incorporation processes of neoliberal values, through which symbolic violence acts by reproducing social structure. As Rehbein and Souza (2015) explain, Bourdieu’s contribution to an analysis of neoliberalism is on the naturalisation of the neoliberal ethic and, through it, social divisions and hierarchies. For these scholars, ‘symbolic neoliberalism’ concerns a peculiar form of symbolic domination based on the incorporation and tacit acceptance of neoliberal values. Through ‘symbolic neoliberalism’ (Rehbein and Souza, 2015), social and economic inequalities in contemporary societies are perpetuated. The diffusion and tacit acceptance of values of equality, freedom, competition and meritocracy legitimise and reproduce class hierarchies. Bourdieu’s contribution permits an analysis of the ways by which Foucauldian disciplinary power is incorporated into everyday life. The concept of habitus allows us to explore the development of tacit ‘neoliberal’ values, beliefs and dispositions in both their emotional and cognitive dimensions.

In the wake of the line of research that traces from Bourdieu through to Skeggs (Allen, 2013; France and Haddon, 2014; Ingram, 2011; McRobbie, 2011; Skeggs, 2004; Stahl, 2015), it becomes possible to explore certain aspects of the dynamics regarding the assimilation of neoliberal principles in young people. As France and Haddon explain, in a Bourdieusian perspective: ‘Neoliberal principles exist not only objectively, in terms of agencies, rules and policies, but have also become subjectively embedded within individuals’ (France and Haddon, 2014: 318). The scholastic institution can be understood, on the basis of the interpretation proposed by Ball et al. (2000), as a site of subjectivation. The students draw on these discourses in the process of constructing their identities. As Ball et al. (2000) explain, the world of school is involved in the reproduction of bourgeois and neoliberal values. The principles of meritocracy (Littler, 2018), competition and success (Scharff, 2016) take on a central role by structuring different learner identities and, consequently, imaginative capacities about the future. Scholars such as Grimaldi and Serpieri have shown that the Italian educational reforms from the past 20 years have provided a neoliberal influence on the national educational system in terms of increasing marketisation, standardisation and managerialism (Grimaldi and Serpieri, 2012).

In addition, the creative sector represents one of the fields where some aspects of neoliberal rhetoric are deployed. In order to examine any possible echoes of the neoliberal discourses on these young students, it is therefore necessary to consider the key role played by the creative field in the new economy. The works by Allen (2013), Nairn and Higgins (2007) McRobbie (2001, 2011) and Banks and Milestone (2011) allow us to see in the creative worker a neoliberal subject. As Walkerdine and Ringrose (2006) explain, the creative worker, with his/her peculiar flexibility, convertibility and propensity to combine work and leisure, seems to embody several key trends of the contemporary world. Hay and Kapitzke (2009) argue how, under the imperatives of uncertainty, risk and flexibility, creativity undergoes a change of its epistemological status, from a liminal and countercultural place to a mere market tool (McRobbie, 2011). This transformation seems to have important repercussions on the same educational institutions that are assigned to train the pupils of the professional creative classes. The neoliberal logics delivered by the school field seemingly connect those that are linked to the creative fields (Banks et al., 2013).

I will focus on scholastic and professional aspirations and, through these, on students’ attitudes towards the future. The ability of biographical construction is problematised as a reflexive capacity required by a neoliberal society (Ball et al., 2000) that invites everyone to become entrepreneurs (du Gay, 1996; McGuigan, 2016); as Scharff explains: ‘Neoliberal subjects are entrepreneurial subjects who calculate about themselves and work on themselves in order to better themselves’ (Scharff, 2016: 218).

Following the reflections of Reay (2013) and Ball et al. (2000), the pervasiveness of the reason for a free market is translated, in individuals’ daily life, into the idea of being able to build up biographical projects of self-realisation. Neoliberalism is, therefore, interpreted as a form of symbolic domination, which has to do with processes of individualisation. The imperative of biographical reflectivity is an expression of the incorporation of the neoliberal ethic. It is possible to question the worldviews of young students prior to them experiencing the pressing neoliberal demands for self-entrepreneurship (Banks and Milestone, 2011; Winkler-Reid, 2017) that is characteristic of the contemporary social world.

The Research: Materials and Methods

The data were drawn from research carried out in 2014–2015 in Italian secondary art schools. On an empirical level, the choice concerned two secondary schools, ⁸ one state and one private, in Milan. The schools selected differed both in terms of size and in the social class composition of the students. The state school was in a suburban area in the north-western periphery of the city and had a student population of 800; the private school was in a bourgeois neighbourhood of the metropolitan area and attended by around 100 students.

The Italian educational system is based on a division between secular state schools and, mainly, Catholic private schools (De Natale, 2007). MIUR data ⁹ (for 2014–2015) indicate that private schools make up 12.6% of the total number of secondary schools in Italy. The Lombardy region, where Milan is located, has the highest rate of private schools. Further, according to the 2014 Istat survey, the highest regional concentration of secondary art schools is in Lombardy (24.7%), of which 36.5% are private. In Italy, secondary state schools are selected by pupils from every social class. Private schools are mainly an elective choice, reserved to privileged pupils from higher social backgrounds, despite the fact that they receive some form of state support (Barone, 2005) in order to democratise them. Secondary private schools have an ambiguous position in the educational sector as these schools are fee-paying and do not have entrance examinations. In contrast to tertiary education, Catholic private secondary schools ¹⁰ do not provide an educational offer that varies much, in terms of quality, from state education. Such schools attract the most conservative and traditional middle-class families, for whom Catholic values and the idea of a separate and elitist educational context are appealing (Grimaldi and Serpieri, 2012).

This divide between high and low social milieus and private and public is very distinct in the schools studied here. The Catholic private secondary art school is a choice for the socio-economic elite of Milan; the state secondary art school attracts students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and a very small group of pupils from liberal and privileged families, more open to fostering diversity.

This study aimed to understand the meanings of this educational choice and the emphasis given by pupils to artistic training. In order to do this, a qualitative approach was used. In these schools, seven focus groups (with students aged 16–21) and 30 in-depth interviews with pupils (selected by means of focus-group experience) and 15 parents were conducted, using the timeline tool. ¹¹ The selection of the students and the gathering of the data took place in three phases, between September 2014 and June 2015. First, I designed a preliminary questionnaire to collect demographic data and to obtain permission from parents and headteachers for the research with minors to be conducted. Informed consent from all participants was then obtained. ¹² I started the research on pupils ¹³ with focus groups and, finally, with in-depth interviews. The only students selected were in their final three years of school. The focus groups and individual interviews were conducted during school hours in classrooms while the informal conversations occurred across different settings. This choice allowed the interview data to be complemented by ethnographic observations made during the lessons and everyday school life. In this way, I participated in the day-to-day life of the classes to better understand the social dynamics and the educative climates. In individual interview settings, the everyday educational experience, the past educational pathways, the sense of artistic involvement, the ambitions and the future projections of students were investigated. The data were thematically coded, and the analysis was structured by a categorization process theory and was data driven. To do this, both a manual analysis and free qualitative textual analysis software (QDA Miner 4 lite) were applied in order to identify the areas and categories. First, each interview text was analysed to better understand the interviewee’s life history. The timeline worked as an instrument of support and summary to produce a vertical biographical analysis of each student. This interpretative work allowed some initial student profiles to be sketched. Interviews and focus group texts were then analysed horizontally, grouping and comparing the discursive materials to identify similarities and differences. The analysis was based on a cultural capital resources framework as only institutional and incorporated forms of cultural capital were considered (Holt, 1997). I envisioned a division between two macro-profiles of student: to delimit the two groups, I made a distinction between students. In the first group are pupils with a high cultural capital and those from high social milieus; the second group includes students with less cultural capital and those from more modest social backgrounds. In the formation of the two groups, the level of education and the employment class of both parents were taken into consideration and ordered according to the principle of dominance. ¹⁴ Disadvantaged students were identified as those with parents with educational qualifications up to secondary school level, those with a vocational qualification and those holding manual jobs. Privileged students referred to those with parents holding higher education qualifications, a diploma, post-diploma and university degrees, and those with non-manual occupations (see Table 1).

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Table 1.

Characteristics of the privileged pupils.

Name	Age	Type of school	Gender	Parental occupation Father Mother
Francesco1	18	Private	M	Dentist with degree	Homemaker with secondary school diploma
Elisabetta	17	Private	F	Secondary teacher with degree	Primary teacher with degree
Lorenzo	18	Private	M	Building entrepreneur with secondary school diploma	Teacher with degree
Elisa	18	Private	F	Entrepreneur with degree	Architect but homemaker
Cecilia	15	State	F	Civil servant with degree	Homemaker with secondary school diploma
Michele	16	Private	M	Doctor with degree	Bank worker with secondary school diploma
Andrea	18	State	M	Entrepreneur with degree	Events organizer with secondary school diploma
Francesco2	18	Private	M	Doctor with degree	Doctor with degree
Veronica	17	Private	F	Lawyer with degree	Nursery school teacher with postsecondary school specialization
Vittorio	18	Private	M	Architect with degree	Architect with degree
Alessandro	17	Private	M	Entrepreneur with secondary school diploma	Visual artist with secondary school diploma
Marta	18	Private	F	Chemist with degree	Executive with degree
Gian Maria	17	Private	M	Architect with degree	Designer with degree
Giulia	18	Private	F	Entrepreneur with degree	Fashion designer with degree

However, these are two large categories so it was therefore necessary to emphasise the rationale for the classification used and, above all, the impossibility, due to the low number of interviews, to examine any internal class divisions (Bourdieu, 1979), for example between the jobs of teacher and executive. Finally, the research also permitted the identification of ‘hybrid’ cases. These cases were very few but were significant at an interpretative level. They referred to the role played by the institutional habitus (Reay, 2009) but they are not dealt with here. In fact, the distinction between private and state schools is not totally representative of the subdivision of the students interviewed in the two interpretative groups. There is a strong but imperfect connection.

Choosing a Distinctive Educational Route

The narrations on ways of living educational life reveal the presence of cultural boundaries on contents of ‘legitimate culture’ and, thereby, feelings of distinction. These privileged students are characterised by their low dedication to study. ¹⁵ They can be understood as particular cases of low levels of academic attainment that resemble, in some ways, old images of ‘learning fatigue’ offered by Aggleton for English pupils (Aggleton, 1984; Ball et al., 2000; de Regt and Weenink, 2005). For example, these pupils highlight a different priority attributed to scholastic learning, artistic knowledge, and daily experience:

I have never been a hard-working student, [. . .] probably I don’t even study for an hour a day [. . .] maybe I put a bit more of my personal cultural knowledge rather than study in greater depth [. . .] I am a little lazy. (A, male, 18 years old)

I have always been a pupil that likes to learn, but not through books [. . .] I prefer to learn by going around the world and learning what we have here that is physical, material [. . .] I’m someone who travels a lot and [. . .] I’ve always neglected studying [. . .] but I prefer to be cultivated in another way. (V, female, 17 years old)

These students clearly distinguish educational success from the idea of personal success or failure. This is a position which is exemplified by the words of the following student:

I study what’s necessary [. . .] but because I’m not interested in the marks, I don’t take it personally, on the contrary! I am someone that doesn’t want to be assessed, I really don’t like [. . .] it’s only a judgement and it doesn’t mean anything. (V, male, 18 years old)

These students represent an example of ‘awkward reproduction’, highlighting issues in the dynamics of the perpetuation of educational privileges. There is a partial difference compared to previous international research on private schools, indicating the strong educational commitment of pupils, even if with emotional costs (Allan, 2010; Reay and Lucey, 2002; Ringrose, 2007). The pupils interviewed established a distance between themselves and the neoliberal rationale of educational success. Their ‘difficult’ learner identities (Reay, 2010) differ, for example, from those moulded by a ‘discourse of the economy of knowledge’ that were identified by Nairn and Higgins (2007) and characterised by the great confidence in the idea of the ‘good life’ (Stahl, 2014) in which serious school commitments correspond to positive employment prospects. In these narrations, I can see a play related to the ambivalence between pupils’ selves to conciliate the low ‘profile’ of school results and the ‘social image’ of ‘good’ youth. There is a dynamic characterised by a deep dimension, both discursive and moral. Within this ambivalence, a rather clear-cut adhesion to neoliberal values takes shape. In these contradictory dispositions and attitudes, a privileged class vision emerges. In this case, the explicit adhesion to values of competition and meritocracy becomes a way of conciliating different and contrasting attitudes toward educational and social life. The students seem to embrace different elements of the neoliberal discourse: the idea of the self-made man, the imperatives of convertibility and flexibility, competition and the emphasis on individual choices, for instance. Their narrations reveal a specific relationship with neoliberal rhetoric. Creativity, therefore, seems to ensure for them a life involving the construction of a learner and social identity in line with the class to which they belong. For example, the idea of art school as an ‘investment’ in the future is a recurrent theme in the narrations of the students, who are sure of continuing their studies at university and of reaching high positions in the market job.

In this narration, feelings of cultural distinction reveal the incorporation and reproduction of symbolic boundaries internal to education paths. School choice is a classificatory process of construction of the self. To be the kind of person for the ‘lyceum’ is an implicit way to affirm a privileged class belonging. There is here a ‘sense of place’ anchored to the stratification of the educational system and a classed vision of the self. Following Friedman, in these words, a naturalisation of privilege by the interiorisation of implicit divisions and hierarchies emerges: ‘the symbolic value of, and social prestige associated with, specific cultural practices are maintained through institutional recognition, consecration and canonisation in the fields of cultural production and education’ (Friedman, 2016: 4).

Conclusive Considerations

The specific contribution of this analysis is the interrogation of the relationship between privilege and art, developing a sociological perspective on artistic education. Within this broad frame, the specific link between creative engagement, a privileged condition and neoliberal ethos is considered as being relevant to interrogate.

The research has allowed us to observe how privileged young people incorporate and naturalise certain symbolic boundaries, reflecting their own educational trajectories and life plans. The empirical data offer a small but precise insight on the condition of Italian youth. Two aspects appear as relevant and strictly linked, under the meritocratic vulgate characteristic of contemporary society and the narrative of talent in creative fields. First, we can see that these pupils have deeply interiorised social class divisions as moral differentiations through feelings of cultural distinction in everyday life, arts and education paths. Second, accordingly, they are closely involved in discourses of individualisation, meritocracy and competition. In particular, the interpretation of individualisation as an expression both of neoliberal logic and class ethos is found. The process of self-making is driven by symbolic boundaries by which pupils define their ‘place’; their narrations reveal dynamics of position taking linked to relational class identities. Their narrations disclose the incorporation of cultural and moral tools by pupils, to understand their position and their available paths and to mark the difference in relation to the ‘other’. The ‘other’ is identified with a low social class background and low-aspiration pupils; ‘lazy people’ unable to make enough of an effort and lacking the skills to climb through society. These privileged students are planners of their biographical constructions. They cultivate high educational and professional ambitions in which art becomes a convertible currency to be spent in many areas. These students’ narrations seem to indicate, above all, a highly reflexive habitus as characteristic of the middle class. This ability to aspire has to do with a peculiar inclination towards positively looking at contemporary uncertainty, perceived as an opening to multiple and possible opportunities. These students appear as highly individualised and reflexive subjects, engaged in thinking that ‘they are the creators of their own destinies’ (Nilsen and Brannen, 2005: 423). The narrations of the interviews reveal how the meritocratic ethos is, in some ways, also a class ethos. This is a crucial point which permits us to grasp the relational dimension of class differentiation and belonging. The incorporation of the ‘meritocratic ideal’ (Friedman, 2016) acts to nourish social reproduction by means of class identity mechanisms. The reported quotations demonstrate a small but relevant aspect of the play of reproduction and the ‘naturalisation’ of power relations. Choosing the educational path and imagining the future is implicated in subtle boundary drawing. The frame that emerges from the interview data designates certain divisions in contemporary Italy, especially in educational and creative fields. Relational class identity dynamics are put into play by interviewed pupils, in which attitudes of cultural distinction are intertwined with moral evaluations, characterised by a neoliberal spirit.

Therefore, the analysis confirms certain results found in previous research on several points related to the intersections of class and gender on educational disposition and aspiration abilities in Italy (Parziale, 2016; Pitzalis, 2012; Pitzalis and Porcu, 2017). Looking at the literature, there are also some relevant investigations on the Italian version of neoliberalism in the educational field, mainly in terms of policy analysis (Grimaldi and Serpieri, 2012; Scacchi et al., 2017 among others). Nevertheless, a more in-depth investigation of the effects of the neoliberal ethos and class belonging in pupils’ identities seems to be lacking. The genesis of the artistic vocation in the young people studied would seem to lie in the encounter, and in the elective affinity, between a bourgeois habitus and the neoliberal discourses which animate the creative world. The propensity of privileged pupils to combine leisure and work, and attitudes of self-entrepreneurship, empowerment, meritocracy and economic success confirms this thesis. Moreover, their affinity with these ideas from neoliberal logics that are disseminated in educational creative fields is exposed. In this intersection between class habitus and neoliberal ethos, the role of the ‘art school’ is found. It appears a breeding ground for competitive, confident and flexible young people. The work raises new investigations between how the neoliberal dictates are incorporated and put in play in everyday life by young people from different class, ethnic and gender belongings.