People here seem to be only enamoured with the culture they know though, don't they? You are looking to pass on what is familiar to yourselves, not what will be of use to your children. My sister, also a professional educator, refers to this cultural nostalgia as an attempt to educate our children to know our past, rather than prepare for their future.

In the school where I work, we currently have Muslim students fasting during Ramadan--Muslim students from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Canada, in addition to the US. The Latino population has exploded here in the last decade. We have a large Asian American population, Native American population, and African American population.

So who is to say we should force student to learn the English poets rather than the Ethiopian or Indian or Chinese poets? Why are the English poets deemed "classic" but the other poets dismissed as marginal, or worse--substandard to the English poets (which is the argument I believe most of you are making).

We are all rooted in the center of each of our cultural universes. But in a pluralist society we have an obligation to learn about one another's ancestral knowledge, not just about our own. *That* is what makes for an educated person nowadays, in my view.