Culture Club

or, how to spend lots of time and money making sure your kid will hate Shakespeare and everyone who looks like him

My son and I were lucky enough to go to a concert on Sunday night (Mozart's Requiem) and a play on Tuesday day (Shakespeare's Twelfth Night). That, to me, is a darned good week. Partly because, like many homeschoolers, I keep track of such things in case I need to defend myself against civilians ("Yes, we're homeschoolers, but we go outside a lot! For culture and stuff! We even see other people and everything!"). But partly because the two of us genuinely enjoy such things. I think that's the greatest thing I've accomplished so far in our homeschooling lives. My eight-year-old son is actually acquiring good taste, and doesn't have to be embarrassed about it.

As a naturally indolent sort, I'm extremely tempted to define having good taste as enjoying things I enjoy. Slightly less lazy and infinitely more cynical would be to take the more common approach that good taste means dutifully partaking of the acknowledged classics in art, music, and literature. Putting the classical station on during breakfast when the kids don't have the energy to do more than snarl at it; bribing them into accompanying you to plays and museums and concerts where their eye-rolling and bitter comments about what they could be doing instead can ruin lots of people's good time instead of just your own.

I see this a lot, and I hate it. I don't mean the sulky behavior of young people generously sharing their resentment about being dragged away from their beloved electronic equipment. I do hate that, but I hate even more the parental behavior that prompts it.

Yes, I do wish that more parents would take their children to plays and concerts. It's how they usually do it when they bother to that's the problem.

First, they treat the occasion like a vitamin pill -- not one of those fun, chewy ones shaped like your favorite animated character, but one that has to be gulped down whole. There is no pleasure in the process, and frankly there's not supposed to be. The point is to ingest a specific substance in order to achieve a certain desirable level of health. And so with the cultural event. Walk past this wall lined with masterpieces. Sit through this concert of sounds by a composer everyone's heard of. Stare at a stage full of people speaking in what sounds like a foreign language, making jokes no one's gotten in over four hundred years. It's good for you.

What's wonderful about this analogy is that it really works. Just not in the way that these parents seem to think. A few years ago, some scientists did a test on the enjoyment of food and nutrition. They took two groups of women: one from a European country where the food is fairly bland (I think it was Sweden), one where the dishes are spicier (might have been Brazil). First, they made a meal for all the women that was spicier than the first group was used to. The Swedish women made some complaints about it; the Brazilians thought it was great.

At the next meal time, everyone was served hamburgers, baked potatoes, and steamed vegetables. The Swedish women enjoyed it and said so. The Brazilians were bored out of their minds.

I probably don't want to know how they tested for this, and I'm sure you don't either, but the scientists checked how much iron was absorbed by each woman after each meal. They confirmed that the women who enjoyed the food they were served absorbed significantly more iron than the women who didn't.

That's just one test, and I don't like it when people make emotional extrapolations from scientific conclusions. That year when everyone was talking (and writing best-selling books) about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as if it had something to do with human love lives instead of quantum mechanics almost killed me. But still, I can't resist the urge to say that science does seem to be supporting a theory I've held for a long time, which is that you can only get so much good out of something that's good for you if you're hating every minute of it.

The analogy doesn't hold completely, because you can detest wholesome nutritious food and crave the deep-fried stuff and still be a whole lot better off embracing (and eating, while you're at it) the former. Whereas if you develop a good deep loathing for "culture" at an early age, you may be worse off for having been exposed to it young than if you'd been left to stumble across it entirely on your own twenty years later.

The language is a clue. Exposed. Why do we talk that way about bringing our children to concerts and plays? My own mother-in-law mentioned, within hearing range of my son, how glad she was that I was "exposing" him to the fine arts. Here I'd thought I was bringing him along to events I enjoyed and thought he would too, while apparently the rest of the world assumed I was bringing him to some kind of cultural chicken pox party.

This is another place where the food analogy rings true. I've known a lot of parents who don't understand why their children don't enjoy healthy food. Usually it's because the parents don't, either. I don't mean they don't eat it; I mean they don't like it. They reluctantly started chewing fiber when they reached a certain age, like some kind of adult-onset termites, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't choose a bowl of Lucky Charms any -- make that every -- day of the week if left to their druthers. They never cultivated a genuine taste for the good stuff, but they expect their children to.

The weird thing about really learning to like healthy fare is that a lot of the horrifyingly bad stuff starts to seem, well, scary. Distasteful. I speak from experience. I grew up in some extremely white-bread suburbs. My mind was fed television and my body fluorescent-orange pasta and pancakes from a mix. I moved to the city, discovered the wonders of the farmers' markets, married a man whose television required so many remotes that I realized one day I no longer had any idea how to turn the bloody thing on (and forget about changing channels), and now can only tolerate the glow-in-the-dark macaroni and the back-and-forth from commercial to program and back to commercial again in small doses. There's nothing wrong with junk food and a gape at the tube in moderation, but a steady diet will rot the soul and the stomach.

I take it back. There is something wrong with those if they're introduced too early. Television and junk food are too easy to ingest. No effort is involved. It's like -- okay, no guilt trip intended to those who bottle-feed their babies, this is just a metaphor that sprang to mind, nothing more; but if you're nursing, the reason that it's a good idea not to offer a bottle too early if it's possible to avoid it is that bottles give the milk without a struggle, whereas nursing is more work. A baby who has once been given the chance to satisfy his appetite simply by opening his mouth is going to be pretty annoyed by the effort a pull at the breast involves. Sure, it's warm and soft; but that other thing is easier, and after a while a little taste of rubber and plastic isn't going to seem so bad.

Getting back to instilling a genuine fondness for higher culture in your child. Any librarian can tell you that there are two things you need to do in order to have more than a random hope of being the proud parent of a pleasure-reader. Read to your child, of course, so he knows what books are in the first place and associates them with something pleasant (namely some quiet close time with you, and if that isn't a pleasant idea to your child, you've got deeper problems than any ranting essay can ever help). But also read near your child. If you keep telling him what a great time books are but never pick one up yourself, he's going to conclude, quite correctly, that you're trying to sell him something.

If you're like a lot of the parents I saw at the production of Twelfth Night we just went to (and if you live in southern California and enjoy your Shakespeare out of doors, check out Theatricum Botanicum's web site for their current schedule) -- heck, if you are one of the parents I saw at the play -- let me ask you something: why are you doing this? Why do you take actual time and money and bring your kids to cultural events? What are you hoping to get out of this?

These aren't rhetorical questions. They're important ones. Because the fact is, if your answer was anything other than "I thought it would be fun," then you're probably doing a pretty good job of imbuing a lifelong hatred of alleged culture in general and The Bard in particular.

As much as I detested The Nanny Diaries, one scene stuck out to me as brilliantly perceptive and heartbreakingly accurate. The main character little boy hasn't seen his mother pretty much all day (we have people for that kind of thing, dear), and is begging her to read him a story before he goes to bed. She reluctantly agrees to read him a page or two from his Shakespeare for Young Readers, but then he has to go right to sleep.

Eww. This kid is, like, four years old. The mom is the most shallow-pated bimbo ever to grace a page. She doesn't know Shakespeare from Shinola. (full disclosure: I received no money or goods in return for this egregious product placement.) She's trying to get her kid into the uppity-up preschool that all the other oh-so-cool kids are going to, and he needs to be able to spout Shakespeare to get there. So she's drilling him in it. Dr. Seuss may be considered great quotable literature some day, but he's not now, so screw him. The Cat in the Hat will find its way to her barren bookshelves when the right people tell her to start reading it and not a minute before.

I am not accusing you for a minute of being guilty of this kind of behavior. (If you are, of course, I'd like you to cut it out right now while there's time to stop your kid from growing up to be a sonnet-spouting axe murderer. Thank you.) But the problem isn't that the horrible mommy above is so extreme in her the-classics-are-important-because-I've-been-told-they-are-and-I-want-to-show-off-how-amazing-my-kid-is lifestyle. The problem is that the spectrum on which this behavior can be found exists at all.

Stop taking your kids to stuff that bores them silly.

Stop inflicting your kids' boredom on people who'd like to enjoy the music or the play without listening to petulant whining from other people's offspring.

Why are you dragging your kid to a concert of music by a composer you don't care enough about to own any cds of?

How often at the end of the day -- or in the middle of it -- do you haul out a volume of Shakespeare just for the hell of it, because that's what you feel like reading?

If the really honest answer to that last one is that you can't count that low, then promise me right now you won't drag your kid to one more production of one of Shakespeare's plays until you start wanting to go to one by yourself. I mean wanting to. Looking forward all week to the night you'll go out and see Romeo and Juliet or Othello.

If you're not at all familiar with Shakespeare -- but wait. Why aren't you? Sorry; that sounded accusatory, and it wasn't meant to be. It was kind of more like saddened, morbid curiosity. The thing is, Shakespeare is usually taught in at least high school, sometimes junior high if you play your cards right; and until recently, he used to be required reading in university no matter what you were majoring in.

So how'd you miss him? How did he miss you? Did you get some Shakespeare thrown in your direction in school, but it was so hideous an experience that you've spent every minute you could forgetting what little you were forced to learn about him and his &@#% plays? Or did your teachers tell you that Shakespeare is only for the rare exceptional people who are smart enough to understand his sheer pure amazing geniushood? (You're in good company there. One woman I know who was fed that nonsense just got her Ph.D.)

Either way, you have my sympathy. When Shakespeare is taught at all, he's almost always presented in a worshipful manner that is just going to annoy the bejesus out of any thinking human being. I lucked out in this respect. My high-school English teacher was the most irreverent guy ever to tackle the greats, and I can't thank him enough for refusing to bow down and worship at the altar of Shakespeare.

(Ironically, thanks to this teacher skillfully steering me toward a real fondness for the Bard, I now actually do have an altar for the big S, if you count an entire shelf occupying a prominent place in my small apartment filled with nothing but books by and about him and adorned with two Shakespeare action figures, a full-sized Shakespeare bust, a "Brainy Babies" beany-baby style stuffed doll of Shakespeare -- we all call it "Billy," which is also what we often call Shakespeare himself, just to keep things friendly -- and a postcard I picked up somewhere that says, "So I haven't written much lately -- so what? Neither has Shakespeare!" I don't actually light incense or anything, mainly because my husband's allergic to it, and I'll be the first to admit that the bust was entirely thanks to an error in the shipping department of a company from whom my friend had ordered me a pair of bookends; but it's still my favorite corner of the house.)

Getting back to my teacher. Every time he said the name "Shakespeare," in a cigarette-roughened voice with just the hint of a southern drawl, he'd scrawl in the air a huge dollar sign. You know -- an S, for Shakespeare's name, but then the two lines drawn through it, to symbolize the moolah factor. "It's all about the money, people," my teacher would say, explaining that Shakespeare was a successful businessman-entertainer who retired as soon as he could afford to. He undoubtedly enjoyed his career, and, yes, he was something of a genius; but the thing to remember about him was that he was shrewd and savvy and knew how to give the people what they wanted: namely, a lot of sex, violence, men in drag, and groan-out-loud puns.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could forget everything you've ever heard about the big S and start out with a first impression like that? Could you really feel daunted about reading that guy's work?

I got even luckier, though. At about the same time, I was working as a street actor for a Renaissance Faire. I didn't play one of those corset-bound, hoop-skirted ladies who could only mince around waiting for the moment when she could duck backstage (okay, our backstage was an enormous tent, but it was somewhere we could go and be out of character without worry that innocent civilians would see or hear us) and loosen her clothing enough to take her first deep breath of the day. The people who taught the workshops one had to take in order to become an actor at this faire explained that lower-middle-class and peasant folk naturally outnumbered the high-falutin' types in the real Renaissance, as they do everywhere and -when else, and so it would be greatly appreciated if some of us could please make the supreme sacrifice of dressing up in wonderfully simple, well-worn clothing -- still lots of skirts for the women, but made of heavy cotton and as thrashed as a lot of hasty rolling around in the muck and the mire could make them -- and swear like Elizabethan sailors.

The teachers also recommended, in order to help our use of the language become truly authentic, that we read as much Shakespeare as we could hold. This was difficult for me. I was a teenager, and still living in Shakespeare-fear at this point. They might as well have asked me to write a play by Shakespeare. I would have felt about as well-prepared. But I was slowly won over when I started to quietly observe the rehearsals of some of Shakespeare's plays that were performed on various stages all over the fairgrounds. Okay, I was a teenager. I think I mentioned that. My hormones were raging. The sight of men and women dressed in truly fabulous clothing and sounding, to me, just hotter than hot with their broad Elizabethan accents and their thou shalts and nay nots helped Shakespeare's cause better and faster than any number of enthusiastic lectures by any number of well-meaning teachers. Seeing was believing. Shakespeare's plays were awesome.

While you were watching them, anyway. When actors who knew what the bleep they were talking about, or knew how to sound as if they did, were rolling his lines trippingly off their tongues. When I finally ventured out and bought my very first paperback copies of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream from the crabby old guy who owned the crabby old bookstore down the street, I was shocked at how much harder it was to understand Shakespeare when I was reading it than when I was hearing it. I was a reader. I had been reading for as long as I could remember -- longer. I was not an idiot. I knew about these plays, and a bit about the guy who wrote them. What was the problem?

The problem in large part, when it comes to reading Shakespeare's plays to oneself, is that they weren't written to be read to oneself. They're plays. They were written to be played. So the best way to get anything out of reading them is to hire a team of first-rate actors to be with you at all times and declaim any scenes you might be having trouble with, because eight and a half times out of ten they'll make a lot more sense if you hear them spoken aloud.

If you can't see your way clear to being quite that big a patron of the arts, there are other things that will help. The little paperback copies of Shakespeare's plays I started out with are actually really good ones to start out with. (I lucked out yet again.) They're also about the cheapest ones you'll come across, and you can even find them at the library. They're called The Folger Library Shakespeare, they're published by Washington Square Press, and they're very considerate because they have a lot of footnotes and those footnotes summarize each scene before you actually read it, so you know what's going on.

Some snooty type once said that reading an annotated version of a great book is like making love by following an instruction manual. I'd say that, here in our corner of the twenty-first century, reading Shakespeare for the first time without footnotes is like being presented with a big pile of lumber, some nails, and a hammer, and being told to build a set of bookshelves. Someone who's an accomplished carpenter or has an exceptional natural knack for that sort of thing might do all right; but the average amateur is going to be completely lost. Most people would agree that someone who really wants to learn woodworking for fun and profit shouldn't start out that way.

So don't. Get yourself some footnotes. Heck, don't even start with the text of the play. I've had to do a lot of research on a wide variety of subjects, and one thing I've learned is that if you want to get a good feel for something you know nothing about, go to the library and head for the children's department. Children's books, unlike the ones written for grownups, don't assume that the reader knows anything about the subject at hand. Quite the contrary. They'll assume you know absolutely nothing at all, and will, to go back to the carpentry analogy that worked so well a paragraph or two ago, build that house for you from the bottom up. Children's books also try to be entertaining, which is a lot more consideration than you'll get from a lot of grownup titles.

Get some picture books about Shakespeare. There's a wonderful biography of him -- Bard of Avon: The Story of William Shakespeare (by Diane Stanley and Peter Vennema). And get a picture book about one of his plays. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the one that children usually start with, because even if they're too young to have fallen in love, they know all about liking the wrong person and being liked by someone they can't stand -- major plot points in this play. Also, there are fairies all over the place -- not namby-pamby Disney Tinkerbells, but full-sized, kick-bootie creatures of the night. If this doesn't sound up your alley, try one of his meatier tragedies -- Othello, Macbeth, or The Merchant of Venice. And if reading a children's book on any subject, let alone this one, just doesn't appeal, try to find a copy of Richard Armour's Twisted Tales from Shakespeare. Armour is just as irreverent as my old teacher when it comes to the Bard, and a lot of fun to read. His slim book pretends to be a textbook, summing up some of the most important plays and asking discussion questions after each one. He loves Shakespeare, but isn't an idiot about him. And his summaries of the plays are sprinkled liberally but accessibly with quotations from the actual texts, which will give you a feel for the unfamiliar language.

The language is unfamiliar. There's no getting around that. That's one of the reasons it's bordering on criminal to drop some unsuspecting child into the audience of one of his plays without so much as telling the poor sap that four hundred years ago, people used to say thee and thou instead of you, and nay and yea (pronounced yay) instead of yes and no. And that's another one of the reasons that so many of us start out with Midsummer Night. It's decently populated with a lot of plain old working-class types, and they don't talk in poetry. The dialogue of the guys who are out there in the woods rehearsing the play they want to throw in honor of the duke's wedding is shockingly comprehensible. It's only when those upper-income types hit the stage that you start to think you fell into The Land of People Who Speak in Sonnets.

The strangeness of the language is exactly why it's so important to see a play and not just read it. You'll get so much more out of it if a decent actor is giving appropriate expression and intonation to the words.

My sister-in-law and I once went to see a local production of The Taming of the Shrew. During intermission, I asked her what she thought of it. She was only nineteen or so and not much of a reader, so I was worried that she might be bored out of her mind. But she was having a good time. She said something very perceptive. For the first few minutes of the play, she had hardly understood a word that was said. "But when I stopped trying to figure out what every word meant, and just started going along with the feel of it, I really started to get it."

That's another plus of seeing one of the plays. A considerate director will have made a lot of ruthless cuts, and all those jokes that were just hy-larious four hundred years ago will usually be snipped right out.

That was about the only thing I didn't like about the Twelfth Night we went to. All the wordplay and the back-and-forth was left in. Now, puns are bad enough when inflicted in your own mother tongue. Thrown at you in a language you're still struggling with, they're unspeakable. The actors seemed to have realized that the lines they were saying would be devoid of humor to modern ears, so they rattled through those bits of the play that were supposed to demonstrate the great wit of the clown or Viola at about the same speed as the announcer on a radio commercial for a great deal on a car once he hits the disclaimers. Then, just to prove to the audience that great humor had indeed taken place, everyone on stage would burst into hearty laughter. I was reminded of a great essay by Jean Kerr (author of Please Don't Eat the Daisies), "I Don't Want to See the Uncut Version of Anything." She comments (correctly):

I have noticed that in plays where the characters on stage laugh a great deal, the people out front laugh very little. This is notoriously true of Shakespeare's comedies. "Well, sirrah," says one buffoon, "he did go heigh-ho upon a bird-bolt." This gem is followed by such guffaws and general merriment as would leave Olsen and Johnson wondering how they failed.

I have no idea who Olsen and Johnson are, but it's still a point well taken. The only times I laughed out loud watching Twelfth Night was in response to what the actors were doing, not what they were saying. (Except in one case. Malvolio, the dourest sourpuss ever to grace the stage, said at one point, "Now I am happy." Not a witty sentence, except that although the character was sincere, he looked and sounded about as happy as a man who stole bread to feed his family and just got sentenced to twenty years in prison for it. The actor who played him bears a passing resemblance to Patrick Stewart in face and voice, so just imagine Captain Picard about to face the Borg, or better yet just having been captured by them, and you'll get an idea of the scowl that graced this actor's face when he pronounced these words. There were actual frown lines around his mouth as he said them, and those only deepened when he heard my yelp of helpless laughter -- I was sitting in the front row, the better to disgrace myself -- and turned to frown even more deeply at me. It was a fabulous moment. Unless you were my son, who ought to be used to this kind of thing but still found it necessary to hiss something about not being able to take me anywhere.)

The long and the short of it is: Shakespeare is fun, and he is work. He is work because we don't talk the way he writes any more, and he's fun because once you do acquire some fluency in his language (and with the help of some good actors and/or judicious footnotes, that doesn't take terribly long), you realize that there's a reason his work has survived so long, and it's not just to torture innocent high school students.

Which brings me back to my main point, which (if you can remember that far back) is an impassioned plea for all parents to stop dragging their kids to Shakespeare. Notice that I didn't say bringing. I said dragging. As in forcing. As in making them perform a chore. If you have to paste a smile on your face and say, "Oh, boy! Guess what we're going to go see!" you're going about this all wrong.

I have a son who not only likes to go to see Shakespeare, but plays the piano and the violin. He's eight years old, and he's not a prodigy, or a stoic for that matter. Fortunately for both of us, I read a lot of Judith Martin (a.k.a. Miss Manners) before he was born, and there was one bit I never forgot. Her theory is that parents should treat cultural events (or lessons likely to lead to the child's participation in such events) as a privilege, not a right. In other words, make them beg.

I was absolutely sickened one day when my son and I arrived a few minutes early for his violin lesson. The previous lesson was still going on, and as the student was a child we knew slightly from another class, we were invited to come in and watch. The little boy had just been given a new violin. His mother asked enticingly if it wasn't the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen; his teacher was finally reduced to putting his arms and hands in the proper position and fairly holding the thing for him.

This was absolutely bewildering to my son. I didn't ask him if he wanted lessons, or even just sign him up for them without a by-your-leave; I had him sit in on some other children's lessons. He was very young, and this looked like the greatest time he'd ever seen. Even after we started violin lessons of his own, we didn't get him a violin right away. He could only practice at school, on a loaner instrument. We told him that we just weren't sure he was ready for one of his own, and anyway it was expensive, so we'd have to wait. The day he got his own violin, he hugged it as if we'd just handed him a pet puppy.

The violin is a cruel and demanding instrument. Eventually, the novelty started to wear off and strain set in. I kept to my guns, though. When he said that the practice was too hard, I said that I guessed he didn't want to take lessons anymore, then, so we could stop. Even if he hadn't been in love with his teacher, this would have been a blow. It's one thing to get to the point of asking to quit; it's another to hear that your lessons are going to be taken away from you. He's been playing for about four years now, and I can afford to be slightly more sympathetic when he's tackling a particularly demanding piece. I do give him pep talks about how if the violin was easy, everyone could play it, and how he's learning to do something that very few people can do. He has a skill to be proud of. But if things get too whiny, I am quick to point out that I'm a busy woman and if he wants to stop taking lessons, it won't interfere with my schedule any. His current teacher is the sweetest of the sweet. She's funny and she lets him play with her chihuahua. She hugs my son and tells him he's wonderful. There's no way he's giving up getting to see her every week, even when his violin is being meaner than usual.

Going to cultural events should follow the same idea. Miss Manners recommends parents getting all dressed up in their finest, giggling as they go off on their date to the concert hall or the theatre. But this is only the beginning.

Requests to come along should never be snapped up. The proper answer is:

"Don't be silly. You wouldn't understand it, and you'd just spoil it for us. There probably won't be any other children there. Anyway, you know what tickets cost these days?...We'll be home in a couple of hours -- unless we decide to get a bite afterward some place."

(The importance of the bite to eat afterwards shouldn't be underestimated, by the way, though it shouldn't be used as a bribe, either. My son and I often go to concerts at a place just a few doors down from a cute, cozy little coffee place, light years away in every sense from one of those franchises. He considers it a great treat to get some cocoa or a muffin and talk over what he liked -- and didn't like -- in the program.)

Miss Manners goes on unrelentingly that if you really push the idea that "this kind of music [or play or whatever] is really sophisticated, and it's for adults only," you will eventually have your children on their knees begging to go. Don't say yes right away, though. Explain that if they aren't familiar with the music or playwright, it won't be any fun.

The next step is familiarizing in a fun way. If we're talking about classical music, let the child call up the local classical radio station and request the piece that you'll be seeing, or anything by the composer. Explain -- or better yet, get a beautiful picture book to explain -- the plot of the opera or play as you cuddle before bedtime. If they're old enough to do some computer research on their own, there are a lot of great sites out there that can give good, simple information about a composer or writer or artist, should you decide to go to a museum in such a way that your kid might actually enjoy it.

Which is another thing I'm sick of -- art museums full of kids who are whining (because their parents are making them look at the actual art) or screaming and tearing about (because their parents consider it enough of an achievement to have the child on the actual premises of great art). Make your child ask to go to the museum -- don't ask him if he would please, as a great favor. Gag. Find out what would be enjoyable and accessible for a child of his age. My son found the idea of cubist art absolutely hilarious, thanks to a very funny book about Picasso by Mike Venezia, who has written a great many winning and genuinely humorous (not to mention inexpensive and found in most libraries) books about composers and artists. This makes it fun to go to the museum with him and look at all the weird pictures of women with both eyes on one side of their faces.

Don't just go to a museum cold and smile brightly at all the "great" art. Learn together about how art has changed through the ages, and why. Play up the exciting stuff. It's shocking now how shocking Impressionism used to be. Don't tell your kid how wonderful Monet and Manet are. Tell him that the Impressionists got kicked out of all the really good art galleries because people were horrified at the idea of pictures being all blurry and weird, instead of crisply realistic. Tell him that other artists were ticked off at "Action" Jackson Pollock for throwing his paint around on the canvas (which as often as not was on the floor), since everyone knew that wasn't how "real" art was created. Find the fun bits like these from art history, and teach them. Read the Greek myths together, and look for stories from them in paintings and Greek vases.

After you've managed all this, possibly the best thing you can do for your child's cultural education is to allow him to have opinions that differ from yours, provided he can support them. Neither you nor he should feel morally obligated to like any artist, composer, or writer just because he or she is now considered "great." What you should be able to do is understand why their work has survived. I personally take no pleasure in Steinbeck, but I know why his writing is important. I'm not running around reading him for pleasure, because there are too many great writers out there that I do enjoy. As long as your child isn't engaging in wholesale acts of dismissal, waving away any- and everyone who might be considered remotely cultural, allow him his own likes and dislikes.

Better yet, when it's at all possible, try not to let your kid know that this play or book or concert is "cultural." A few months ago, I wrote an e-mail to James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. He suffered under overly-reverent teachers of Shakespeare, and is now fighting for Shakespeare the man and playwright to replace Shakespeare the god in our culture. Anyway, he had a piece in the L.A. Times a few months back, and I really liked it and wanted to say so. He was nice enough to write back. Here's what he had to say on the subject of bringing children to Shakespeare:

I have a nine-year-old who has been going to see Shakespeare (first outdoors, then in theaters) since he was four, in both NYC and London. I never drag him to any high culture -- opera, symphony, etc. -- but I was curious what would happen if you don't tell a kid that Shakespeare is "Shakespeare." And our one rule is that we walk out the minute he says he wants to. He has a dozen or so productions under his belt, and loves the stuff -- though he still doesn't know that Shakespeare is something one studies in school. His recent reaction to Hamlet, which he refused to leave: "It was a massacre."

Now, who could have summed it up any better than that?

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