Jim Dixon mentioned Star Wars above as an example of new cultural myths our kids have great knowledge of, which we didn't have as children. Last night, our local PBS station aired the excellent "Power of Myth" series with Joseph Cambell. He talked about how well the Star Wars series exemplified the "hero with a 1000 faces" mythology and explained how we, as a culture, still need to create new myths.

Science fiction and fantasy genres are areas where great storytelling and mythologizing is being done all the time in engaging ways. Harry Potter would fall into this category, but apparently Harry Potter is good because Rowling writes for children, but Phillip K Dick and Sheri Tepper are bad because they write for adults.

Because of the cultural condescension towards those literary genres by the intelligentsia, our kids rarely get the chance to read the very stuff that would engage them most in school, and make them avid readers. Why keep forcing kids to read Shakespeare, when the main outcome is it destroys their desire to read at all?