GUTTING THE CURRICULUM. Daniel Drezner recommends an inflight magazine article! that comments on cultural literacy, using awareness of Joyce Kilmer's twee poem Trees as a marker for a generation gap in knowledge. Key paragraph:

It turns out that the year you were born may be a more important factor in what you know than the schools you attended or which side of the tracks you were born on. The generation gap is less about attitude and more about cultural points of reference, less about how long you like your hair or how short your skirts and more about whether you identify the Kennedy tragedy as something to do with the president or with his son.

Perhaps. But awareness of popular culture is, by definition, transitory, and popular culture is popular in some cases precisely because it is empty. On the other hand, awareness of a canon of received knowledge is useful for understanding many things. Take, for example, landmark opinions in the regulation of public utilities. On first reading of these, I was struck by the frequency of classical allusions in them. I know not whether such things are as common in landmark court decisions elsewhere in policy, but suspect that, as the same justices are involved in writing those opinions, similar allusions will occur there. And it is a crime to deprive youngsters of the background by which they can grasp such things. Supreme Court rulings are cumbersome enough to read even if you do know the classics.