School leavers should know how to cook a meal, handle domestic finances, take part in a debate, enjoy the theatre and use the internet.

In a lot of primary schools now (not necessarily posh ones, either) they do exactly this. My mate was a Teaching Assistant for a bit, and the school he did this in had a projector hooked up to a laptop in each classroom so that the teacher could google something if a kid asked a question the teacher didn't know!

This is roughly how people have always gotten through life and will continue to do so. Teaching specific life skill is always a great idea, but the thing they're actually trying to accomplish here is less a matter of that, and maybe more a matter of trying to give people a good enough general education that they have any interest in, say, taking part in a debate.

uh-huh. that's why my dad, who's a volunteer for the citizens advice bureau, never sees anyone come in in a state of blind panic because they've managed to get themselves in some horrific debt hole because nobody ever bothered to teach them the basics and, for whatever reason, they never quite picked it up for themselves?

but hey, even if these people existed - and they obviously don't; my dad must be putting LSD in his porridge again - the answer's simple: they "pay an accountant". silly me. i forget that accountants are happy to work for fresh air and a smile.

You cannot pay someone to be open-minded for you, or appreciate beauty/wisdom/human nature in whatever form.

er, no, and you can't force someone to be open-minded or appreciate beauty and wisdom either. hellfire, i'm 31 and my tastes and sensibilities are growing and changing all the time. i'm frequently amazed and overjoyed by my capacity to learn more about art in all its forms, and to enjoy things i never thought in a million years i would.

this is perhaps in some way related to my education, which had a classical bent (ie i studied latin and greek and had mad old teachers who let me watch "if ..." in liberal studies) but is very much a part of who i am, my own aesthetic sensibilities etc. like i say: my brother-in-law, who's a top lad and a talented painter and musician, would rather de-nad himself than go to the theatre. does that make him a lesser human being? i think not. and he's certainly far more useful with a tax return - or a hammer and a drill - than i am, that's for certain.

i mean, i speak as a complete ponce for whom art provides a validity to life, but i really think this "teaching children to appreciate the theatre" nonsense is misguided bourgeois shitwittery of the first order. IT WON'T WORK. teaching them how to deal with tax and 'leccy bills, however, just might.

I'm not sure what I'd say should be cut instead, but in my particular rural school district, there was a lot of administrative waste and sports money in the budget every year that could go (sports funding is rarely cut because apparently, unlike for music, it's very important for kids to grow up well-rounded and develop important life skills and discipline from sports).

It's just that I can think of a lot of people who are fine at the infrastructure of life, meeting legal obligations etc but shite at thinking clearly or appreciating big swathes of human experience and HEY, GUESS WHAT? THEY VOTE!

Maria, schools in NYC have been known to cut sports and recess periods for lack of funding/facilities, with entirely predictably horrifying results in classroom behavior and attention span, esp among boys.

I mean, that it's not true strictly as written. I still think there's something to it SOMEwhere.

it probably won't surprise anyone to know that i was always second-last to be picked for the rugby team (the last kid was invariably the fat dude who came out onto the pitch wearing his thermal vest) but at least i was getting some exercise. i HATED sport with a passion, and indeed still do, but again, what was more important: that i was kept at least vaguely healthy or that i learned to play the tuba?

xpost: laurel, do you really think that forcing uninterested and uncaring children to sit through more shakespeare will stop them growing up into uninterested and uncaring adults? it's a lovely idea, and you sound like a genuinely decent and caring person, but sadly the world is a shitty place full of shitters and i don't think forcible exposure to great art will do a single thing to change that.

whereas teaching said children how not to mire themselves in horrific debt-laden misery might just a) improve the balance of society as a whole between the haves (usually overprivileged cunts like me who were lucky enough to be born in the right place) and the have-nots; and b) give more people more disposable income to spend on going to the theatre anyway :)

CHEMISTRY and all that other science bullshit which was tedious at the time, which went in one ear and straight out the other, which i got straight As in with 0 effort or knowledge, and which hasn't been in the least bit useful to me since.

i think the "teaching kids to appreciate the theatre" is probably the most adequately done thing on that list at the moment! i mean, it's not about forcing kids to love the theatre, it's about giving them the opportunity to see it (which most probably wouldn't) and other art forms. i think school trips to the best artistic events possible - exhibitions, theatre, concerts - should be mandatory and as free as possible. and without any air of "you must like this".

This is roughly how people have always gotten through life and will continue to do so.

i would argue that most people who get by in life with only basic knowledge of these things would probably rather get by with a little bit more knowledge. i know i would rather know what a tax return is! i have this nagging feeling that it might be important.

yr not British, then?

All school literature classes are basically forcing uninterested and uncaring children to sit through literature and not grow into uninterested and uncaring adults. I think it has to do some small amount of good, even if it's not totally transformative and the source of a lifelong love of literature. And would teaching children not to mire themselves in horrific debt-laden misery would actually take much longer than teaching one complete Shakespeare play?

super xxxpost.

(And as a side issue, our received-wisdom shorthand for high-culture experiences tend to revolve around things that are increasingly archaic, like ballet, opera, and poetry. Thing is, if you're just shooting for that big-picture goal -- winding up with kids who are able to be open-minded and think critically about art and culture -- you can just as easily develop that with a lot of different media. I suppose the obvious example these days would be the number of people who wind up learning to think this way by being music geeks, but a more apt approach might be to read fiction not in terms of testing students' comprehension, but as something they might have aesthetic opinions about.)

I mean, that's not a knock on any of those things -- it's just a flat fact that the art forms average people most strongly associate with Proper High Culture tend to be old and not incredibly vibrant or relevant in modern terms. The ballets and operas people think of as cultured and sophisticated are centuries old; it shouldn't be controversial to point out that these formats peaked a very long time ago, and aren't exactly major forms of expression in the modern-day US or UK. Poetry does a little better, relevance-wise, but much like ballet and opera, it's largely supported by small academic circles and arts philanthropy and grants, not any kind of significant public audience -- and once again, the names that would come up on a Family Feud board for "name a high-culture poet" were all buried hundreds of years ago. Classical music: the same.* (And I think we all know that when laymen talk about the need to appreciate these things, they are not usually talking about exposing children to cutting-edge dance choreography or 21st century microtonal compositions.) I'm glad there are people who keep these forms alive, and people who keep them pushing forward in new directions, and I'm happy to see the many ways in which they still have profound effects on a lot of people -- all sorts of people -- but it'd be insane to claim they're particularly vibrant or prevalent or popular media for artistic expression in the 21st century (even among the educated upper classes who made them seem important centuries ago).

(* Classical music is actually a bit more like soccer in the U.S. -- the kind of thing a lot of people are involved in when they're young and yet turn out not to be massive consumers of across the rest of their lives. But obviously even the kind of puffed-up semiclassical and opera music that's moderately popular is like deliberately archaic, all plush curtains and violin soloists in corsets and "look, this is cultured old-Europe stuff" -- on some level it's playing to the very same "eat your vegetables" vibe that's behind telling kids this stuff is where sophisticated High Culture lives.)

From 1990 to 2004, over 172 new operatic works were produced by professional opera companies in North America. (Source: OPERA America)

and there's at least one opera company of some sort in every city in America with a metro population > 1 million (excepting Las Vegas, Buffalo, and OKC, but there are opera companies in Reno, Erie, and Tulsa, respectively).

Opera and (semi-)classical are doing damned well right now, but -- like I said -- basically in a tarted-up archivist's sense, pretty much just finding as many large-breasted blonde soloists as possible and soaring on guys like Boccelli, who just about no one with any knowledge of the art form thinks is particularly talented in the least. It's doing decently well as a kind of lifestyle music right now, which, yes, probably makes it more alive than usual. (Although maybe not -- surely this stuff is on a continuum with people buying millions of Mantovani records in the 50s and 60s, or endless film soundtracks during the 80s.) But for the most part I don't see people engaging with it in any kind of committed or analytical way, which is the whole teaching opportunity we're talking about -- it seems to me that the bulk of sales of this kind of stuff are going to people who were not previously interested in classical music, and then hit a certain age and found the top-40 stations were all hip-hop these days, and were suddenly taken with either throwing on some Norah Jones or dabbling in showy, easily digestable, stagily old-Europe classical.

Anyway, we really don't need to argue about exactly how popular and/or archaic opera is: my fairly minor point was that the formats we point schoolkids to in order to teach them about high art are ones that have significantly fallen off as the dominant or most current forms of the present. The top-level popular conception of high art consists mostly of stuff that's centuries old, to the point where for the average person, the concept of "artistically sophisticated" is more or less not distinguished from the concept of "very old and European and with fancy dresses."

the number of US adults who attended at least one opera performance in 2002 exceeded the number who attended at least one nickelback performance in 2006 many times over, and was twice the number of adults+kids who bought 2006's biggest selling album. the number of adults who experienced opera in some form during that year exceeded the number of adults+kids who have ever purchased an album by willie nelson, bob dylan, def leppard or the backstreet boys.

more than half the operas in the standard repertoire are less than 150 years old, and about 30% are from the 20th century

that's attendance in one year compared to sales over as much as 40 years

well no, the whole point of high culture is that it isn't pop

more than triple, actually, but CFL attendance was more than three times that of Canadian opera attendance

'experience', actually, not attendance

YES, WE KNOW SHAKESPEARE MADE A FEW KNOB JOKES. GET OVER IT.

I WANT CHEAP SERIOUS ELITIST THEATRE!!

er, nothing else to add, really. other than "nabisco OTM", but i feel such truisms should be banned from the sandbox and indeed from nuILX :)