This chapter argues that the relationship between popular culture and the classroom remains a contentious issue. Its presence has been used as a symbol of how much our culture has declined and how educationally corrupted our schools have become, while its absence has been used to suggest our schools are out of touch with their primary constituency ߝ young people. This is not a simple issue to address; even the notion of ‘culture’ itself is subject to considerable disagreement.

Chapter 3 analyses the cultural politics of protest in the 1960s. It examines the transformed understanding of high culture created by a mass market for paperback books.The chapter challenges the idea that the protest movements of the 1960s had their origins in a particular set of intellectual texts – often summarised as Mao, Marx, Marcuse. It traces the history of mass-circulation books in the 1960s and their perceived challenge to the organisation of high culture. I argue that the protest movements of the 1960s first promoted open access to high culture, then attempted to recast the meaning of high culture and developed a critique of commodification. I argue that this transformation did not democratise knowledge as expected, but it did contribute to the desacralisation of high culture and an old regime of elite culture.

Chapter 4 analyses the cultural politics of the protest movements. It traces the way students sought to democratise access to high culture, revise the content of high culture for a new era and abolish the distinction between high and low culture altogether, while also succumbing at times to the temptation of anti-intellectualism. I argue that the cultural drives of the protest movement – democratisation of access, desacralisation and anti-intellectualism – proved contradictory, ultimately leaving unfulfilled the diverse goals of the movement. The period of the late 1960s was marked by both a collapse of the traditional idea of high culture and the inability to find a consensus on what should replace it.

The century of Russian genius presented in the pages above opened with the soldier who saved Peter the Great from death and closed with Daniil Kharms’s travelers spreading kindness and tolerance. In between, a panorama of extraordinary cultural richness unfolded, with layer upon layer of innovation in the arts. Throughout, the creativity of high culture drew on rich folk traditions, and the burgeoning popular culture took inspiration from above. Three themes – freedom and order; the boundaries of self and society; and the societal obligations of art and artists – played out in an enormous body of literature, music, and the visual arts. The firebird, caged or free, captured or in flight, is central, as is the fox, who (usually) succeeds in securing her objectives through wile and guile. The works of this age of genius were created over decades under conditions of recurrent social disruption and trauma. Despite formidable obstacles, brave and talented writers, artists, musicians and others remained committed to expression of naïve goodness to counter evil. That this message prevailed, even if restricted to a subset of works and a segment of audiences, is a dimension of moral genius comparable to the lauded artistic brilliance of the age.