Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Read the New York Times every day, The Atlantic, and the New Yorker. You can add to that list but that would get you a long way.
This is good advice. I grew up middle class and pretty broke in the Midwest. My parents longed for a different life and we got the Sunday NYT, the Atlantic and the New Yorker at home. This was back in the heyday of magazines so we also had stacks of fashion magazines and Vanity Fair. We also watched CBS Sunday Morning before church. That all gave me a glimpse into a different world and the ability to slip into college and my first job in NYC with a little bit of camouflage.
Nowadays culture is so driven by money that I would only bother because you want your kids to know and learn, not because you want to equip them to be part of certain worlds. Those worlds are mostly gone.
I don’t think being cultured will give my kid any tangible advantage, that’s for sure.
I value being a cultured person (in a broad sense, from music to current events) in and of itself and I just hope my son will also take pride in being well-read and all around knowledgeable one day.
-OP
OP, I’m legitimately inspired that you care.
I take a lot of pride in being well-read and all-around knowledgeable, but I’ll be the first to say that it’s an increasingly lonely or even scoffed-at effort. My child’s fancy private school is overrun by real estate investors and developers, tech execs, and other new millennium white collar jobs. I go to book clubs in the neighborhood and only 2-3 of us ever read the books. The parent pushback about teaching the basics of literature, arts and even history is constant. I grew up in an era and place when white collar=doctor and lawyer, and parents read books and multiple newspapers daily, and could help us with history and English homework. Now anyone who even has time to read a book is seen as antisocial or an underemployed slacker.
It makes me sad for where we’re at now.
Thank you so much for your kind words, PP!
How is it possible to be in a book club and not read the books? I mean, isn’t the whole point to discuss them?
Also, why do parents push back on literature and arts? I thought the whole point of being at a private school was to get some tried and true basics of humanities (since in public many things are too “progressive”, at least in the blue states).
I don’t know if you are open to it, but if you could find some emigres from the former USSR around you - many of them are quite cultured, though of course skewed towards certain things.
I generally share your sense of loneliness - I think with age I started to care about too many things in the world around me, and it’s hard to find people who not only know what I am talking about, but also don’t have extreme opinions or are at least capable of accepting the fact that someone has a different one.
With books and movies and shows it’s mostly that people don’t watch or read much, but with current events it’s mostly opinions.
-OP