Worship the Young and Venerate the Old?

This is a youth-oriented society, and the joke is on them because youth is a disease from which we all recover.

           -Annonymous

American culture idolizes youth. Youth represents strength, both physical and mental, beauty and plasticity. The United States is a young country after all, not just because of its demographics but also historically and architecturally.

An old building in Boston can be no more than 300 years old, compared to Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, China's Qin Dynasty tombs or India's Virupaksha Temple; architecturally we are babies. No ancient structures dominate our landscapes.  Los Angeles  may have its share of crumbling buildings not because any building has weathered more than 200 August heat waves, but because cheap materials with no staying power were used in construction.

So, part of why we venerate youth may be a form of collective self-esteem.  As a culture, as a nation we are young, and so we love youth. To be young and beautiful means higher paying jobs and social opportunities. To be young and bright means hard work and a little luck may land you on NASA's newest mission to Mars or in the Oval Office, regardless of where your parents came from.  Youth are not held back by heavy familial traditions or responsibilities.Old age is perceived as defeat.  People fight it.  Americans want to stay young and any benefits middle-age or beyond may bring are lost to us.

In France, although the beauty of youth is celebrated, age is respected.  The old are seen as not only wise, but deserving of attentions small and large. Ecuadorians honor their elders by giving people of "the third age" steep, sometimes more than 50% discounts, on airplane and theater tickets and there is no set retirement age.  Healthy octogenarians work alongside younger people and are consulted and prized as workers for their experience. In fact, in the small Andean city of Vilcabamba, older people tend to exaggerate their ages, they want to seem older than their true chronological age. The young are seen as inexperienced and look for guidance from the older members of society.

The benefits of providing myriad opportunities for the young in the United States are clear.  Americans believe in possibilities and that is most clear in the iconoclasm surrounding youth. But much is lost with the vilification of old age and with classic American images of  the sunset years as disease-ridden and characterized by mental decline and irrelevance. These perceptions bode well for no one, not even the very young.  What is there to look forward to if your life opportunities and relevance peak within the first three decades of life?  This is simply culturally unhealthy and even pathologically ignorant. 

A Faustian Bargain

All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country.  A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it.  But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

- William D. Howells (1913), American Writer and Critic

A literature-based education is the exact opposite to Standards-Based schooling, the public school reform movement that has defined the first decade of the 21st century.  Schools today work to collectively raise the standards, or scores, of American students.  The key word here is collectively.  The final end of American public education today is to raise collective scores. This is what administrators focus on and look to inspire teachers to accomplish:  higher standardized test scores.  To what end exactly?  According to educational consultant Ruby Payne , raising the real estate values of communities, is an important reason children should go to school and do well on standardized exams. 

Are we deliberately training a generation of under-educated, apathetic and literary ignorant people; that is, classic barbarians, so our homes will retain or increase in value?

That seems like a terrible trade, like nothing short of a Faustian bargain. 

No Easy Acess for Us

Google Books will not digitize French literature, french president Nicolas Sarkozy announced today.

"We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is,” Sarkozy said.

 So France will fund and thus control its cultural digitization project.
This refusal to let french literary treasures swim amongst Google's classic books with no obvious distinction; naked for the entire world to judge impartially, seems arrogant and cowardly.  The idea that French literature should only be doled out, beautifully packaged, by the French government seems limiting and could prevent future digitized generations from accessing some of humanity's greatest works as easily as I can today by visiting my local library.
In today's physical libraries, Victor Hugo and Pieter Hugo may stand side by side.  Most libraries don't have a room dedicated to french literature and so french greats may be stumbled upon by innocent seekers.  If French works are absent from the world's largest and possibly most efficient digital library, would not that be a loss for the French and the rest of us, in the end?
I love the aesthetic considerations that are a French obsession and surely play a role in this decision to keep digitized literature in French hands.
But, would it not be better if Sarkozy's government funded a French-controlled cultural collection and at the same time turned a blind public eye to whatever Google is doing and future plebeians across the globe might still stumble upon French literally grandeur?