>Besides, a lot of our Western pop & dance are pretty good.
Personally, I would rather my second grader be immersed in pop and dance right now simply because that's what she likes. I was reading an essay by J.G. Ballard just the other day where he talks about having read masterworks when he was in his teens and realizing decades later he wasn't ready for them at the time and that it may have done him more harm than good. He also said he now feels he was naive to worry about his own children being more interested in pop music than in reading Pride and Prejudice. I just found the essay on the web:
>Like many parents who brought up teenagers in the 1970s, it worried
>me that my children were more interested in going to pop concerts
>than in reading Pride and Prejudice or The Brothers Karamazov - how
>naive I must have been. But it seemed to me then that they were
>missing something vital to the growth of their imaginations, the
>radical re-ordering of the world that only the great novelists can achieve.
>
>
>I now see that I was completely wrong to worry, and that their sense
>of priorities was right - the heady, optimistic world of pop
>culture, which I had never experienced, was the important one for
>them to explore. Jane Austen and Dostoyevsky could wait until they
>had gained the maturity in their twenties and thirties to appreciate
>and understand these writers, far more meaningfully than I could
>have done at sixteen or seventeen.
>
>
>In fact I now regret that so much of my reading took place during my
>late adolescence, long before I had any adult experience of the
>world, long before I had fallen in love, learned to understand my
>parents, earned my own living and had time to reflect on the world's
>ways. It may be that my intense adolescent reading actually
>handicapped me in the process of growing up - in all senses my own
>children and their contemporaries strike me as more mature, more
>reflective and more open to the possibilities of their own talents
>than I was at their age. I seriously wonder what Kafka and
>Dostoevsky, Sartre and Camus could have meant to me. That same
>handicap I see borne today by those people who spend their
>university years reading English literature - scarcely a degree
>subject at all and about as rigorous a discipline as music criticism
>- before gaining the experience to make sense of the exquisite moral
>dilemmas that their tutors are so devoted to teasing out.
http://www.uiowa.edu/~c08g001d/Readings/jgballard.html