Resources: Classic text revisited ... Common Culture Paul Willis,1990

If not, then he is not a bad place to start for those concerned in particular with valuing and giving recognition to the creativity of young people.

At a most basic level, the concern of Willis and his collaborators is to knock high culture off its pedestal and celebrate the creativity of the everyday, rather than allow the institutional power of the arts establishment to define and control - or the alternative offered here of "symbolic creativity".

The opening sentences of this book have declamatory force, "the institutions and practices, genres and terms of high art are currently categories of exclusion more than of inclusion. They have no real connection with most young people or their lives". Against this is the vibrant creativity of everyday life, the combination and interpretation of signs and sounds and meanings that happen outside art galleries or temples. This is "common culture" in the sense that it is of the many, but also in that it is shared. Willis's point is to "understand the creative symbolic elements of everyday life", not extend the critical apparatus of the art industry to popular forms and push open the doors of the canon a bit wider.