The nurseryfication of culture

Nina Welsch has a fine Critic piece on what she calls the nurseryfication of culture.


The nurseryfication of culture

Alienation has encouraged the normalisation of childishness

An “educational” video released by the Manchester Museum went semi-viral recently. I’ll give you the highlights to get it over with it. In it, a young female employee introduces herself as “using they/them pronouns” (sigh) and that “today, we’re finding Pride in our collection” (sigh). Their focus is the museum’s collection of taxidermic birds from the Victorian era. The Victoria era, they explain, was run by “cis, white, straight men” (sigh) and that is why there are more male birds than female ones in the collection. The way the birds are positioned, with the handsome males standing over the more submissive-seeming, plain-plumaged females is indicative of these patriarchal norms (sigh). They then point out the way bird families are grouped together with their chicks and how this reflects the implicitly oppressive “nuclear family” (are you drinking yet?).

There’s too much wrong with it to highlight everything — from the cynical anthropomorphising of non-human animals to the fact that the “nuclear family” wasn’t really coined until the 1950s and in the USA, nothing to do with Victorian Britain. It is just one of countless examples of ideological dumbed-down, virtue-signalling historical revisionism that leaves us all culturally poorer.


The whole piece is well worth reading as another aspect of the wider infantilisation of adulthood, particularly this point in the final paragraph.


When nursery children adorn badges, it is a way of grounding themselves in their surroundings and place in it, making sense of their little story in a vast picture interweaving countless. With adults who work in the heritage sector who cover themselves in pins and badges, it seems to be the opposite — a way of standing out from the history, artefacts or knowledge their workplace is steeped in. At a push, I’d call it almost disrespectful. What is missing in the cultural soul of so many people that they can play a privileged part in maintaining the legacies of such valuable institutions and still feel the need to signal to all that enter: Look At Me?