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Parents Weekend Address October 18, 2008 Richard B. Commons
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t our first Sit-Down Dinner of the fall, as an icebreaker, I asked my table, “What was the best movie of the summer?” It worked. There was immediate response and discussion. Initially, there was some squaring off along gender lines, but two girls eventually crossed over and agreed with the guys that the honor should go to the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, if only because it features Heath Ledger. Lindsay and I have not gone out to see a movie in twenty months, which is, by sheer and inexplicable coincidence, the precise age of our son, Matthew. Whatever the cause, we have some cultural catching up to do. Eager to get more good recommendations, I asked the table: what’s the best movie of the last year? There was no hesitation and no real debate. Hands down, the unanimous winner of “best picture” at my Sit-Down table was something called Superbad. I began to scribble on the back of my napkin: Movies to see: The Dark Knight, Superbad. “Um, Mr. Commons,” said the welldressed young man to my right, “I don’t think you and Mrs. Commons want to see Superbad.” He winced and shook his head to emphasize his point. I looked around the table at the other members of the Academy. “Are you recommending that I not see your unanimous selection for best picture?” Another member of the Academy spoke up: “It has a lot of bad language in it.” A third chimed in: “And it’s kind of about sex.”
Headmaster Rick Commons addresses parents in the Hall.
4 | Quarterly Winter 2009
Enjoying the Sixth Forn evening reception are: Bill ’59 and Julie Kemble P ’91, ’09, Madeleine Kemble ’09, Ashleigh Corvi ’09, Cindy Willis P ’09, and Danielle Rainer ’09.
You all are familiar with this irony. While I do not yet have teenage children, I live with yours, so I’m familiar with it too. They are wonderful kids, they want the best for us, and they are trying to protect us from the vulgar aspects and pernicious influences of popular culture. This is ironic, isn’t it? To be fair, who among us does not remember trying to “protect” our own parents in similar ways? Still, I think most of us would agree that the decency of popular culture has been on a fast march downward in recent years, while technology and mass media have made the indecencies all the more accessible, to the point of being virtually unavoidable for this generation of young people. Setting the ironies aside, how do we go about educating this generation in a cultural context that might itself be called “superbad”? This is a critical question for parents and teachers, and it is one that we ought to be answering especially well if we want to go on proclaiming, as I do, that Groton is a great school.
Over the summer the entire Groton faculty read a book called Everything Bad is Good for You. The central argument is that popular culture is often thought to be dumbing down our society and particularly our youth, but certain elements of it are actually making us smarter. The book does not try to suggest that the violent video games, sexually explicit movies, and cheap thrills of an impersonal Internet culture are good things. Rather, the argument is that the nature of their presentation forces the consumer to be mentally nimble and insists on a kind of multi-dimensional concentration that is good for the brain. The increasingly stimulating delivery of popular culture, the book asserts, may in fact be responsible for steady general increases in IQ and SAT scores. As one who spent a good portion of last summer trying to get through War and Peace and who is now aiming to finish that project over Christmas break, I have to wonder whether seeing The Dark Knight or even Superbad would somehow be better for my brain than Tolstoy. To my disappointment, the author of Everything Bad is Good for You does not present a formula that weighs popular culture, with its unhealthy ingredients but brain-stimulating delivery, against great books, with their wholesome ingredients