ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some aspects of the ways in which we think about the concept of culture, why it seems to be of importance and how it relates to the concept of education. It argues that the concept of 'culture' is an abstraction and in this respect it is similar to concepts such as the 'State' and 'society'. What seems to be of greater relevance for the theme of culture and education, is the process of generating and transmitting the more formal and in some sense 'official' or dominant elements of our culture. The chapter considers the main senses in which the word 'culture' is used by Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot and Raymond Williams. It argues that when an attempt is made to define and describe a particular culture, and produces an abstraction similar to that produced by an historian who selects and simplifies in order to give an historical account of what in reality was a complex of events.
