Art choices are influenced by education

Recite after me, “We are all individuals”. OK, having got that Pythonist wisdom out of the way it is true that we are all unique yet there are things about you that can be attributed to your heredity, your culture, or even your social class. In a new study researchers set out to see what makes people more likely to take up things like art, music, writing, dance, and photography. They found that social class is influential to a small degree but within that there is a characteristic that is a singular driving force of artistic endeavour.

The study came from the University of Oxford, UK and involved 78,000 people who were surveyed about their background and artistic pursuits, if any. They found that 18 per cent had taken part in painting or photography, 10 per cent in music, 9 per cent in dance, 6 per cent had written (poetry, plays, or fiction), and 2 per cent in drama or opera. Only 22 per cent had not taken part in any artistic activities at all.

The data showed that middle class people were slightly more likely to take up artistic pursuits. As far as social status though, those in higher professional jobs were actually less likely to take part than those in lower professional jobs. Higher income also reduced the likelihood of a person picking up a brush or pen, especially if they earned over 30,000 pounds ($65,000 Australian).

The clearest link with artistic activity was education; the higher education the more likely to partake of the arts.

The clearest link with artistic activity was education; the higher education the more likely to partake of the arts. Even after allowing for socioeconomic status those with a bachelors degree were four times more likely to take part in painting and photography than those with no education, four times more likely to play a musical instrument, and five times more likely to be involved in dance and crafts.

Interestingly, among graduates those with a middle class background were no more likely to take part in the arts than those with a working class background. So the link between the arts and the middle class is simply that the middle class are more likely to be more highly educated.

So arts participation is not linked social class but is linked to education. Since the arts are one the things that quintessentially make us human, surely this makes education a fundamental right and obligation of any society. Any attempt to cut funding to education is tantamount to diminishing our humanity.