When I was a teenager without much cash and in need of things to read and listen to, my parents’ interests and tastes really formed my own. I basically permanently “borrowed” from them, listening to their music and reading their books.

The great thing about nicking stuff from your parents is having more than just the tastes and interests of youth being reflected back at you. I came across books by new authors, amazing recordings you could no longer buy, artists I had never heard of, composers I still love. I read things that were too hard. I pretended to read things that were harder still, and kept them on my bookshelf, hoping that one day I’d be brave enough to pick them up. My tastes became more sophisticated and more adult because of what I borrowed. I was discovering how little I knew, and stepping out of my ignorance into what felt like a new world.

If you think back to your teens, the books that change you then change you forever, and you probably never feel that intensely about a piece of music as you do at that time. It therefore matters what you are getting exposed to as a teenager. Never again are you so receptive to being changed by culture. Never again will you be changed so profoundly by those experiences.

In a way, we all borrow from the generations before us. But the “sharing” we did as a family pales into insignificance in the face of the sheer scale of the “sharing” culture on social media in 2019. The cash-strapped teenagers of today don’t need to nick Mum’s music, or read Dad’s books. Our students are sharing and receiving little bits of culture all the time, but from whom, and what kinds of things?

Sharing is central to the ideals of a liberal education. On this view, the core aim of education is to pass on cultural treasures. Education is about sharing the best of human achievements so far, the best of music, literature, art and learning with the next generation. In liberal arts colleges in the US, which are founded on the values of a liberal education, schools have lists of great books, and all students are expected to read them. Students receive a broad education that shares with them the best of what has gone before.

And the purpose of all of that is to get to the truth. At its roots, liberal education is about guiding students towards enlightenment. Plato famously said we were all like prisoners, trapped in a cave, unaware of the great extent of our ignorance. Education happens when we are guided out of ignorance, and towards truth.

The word “education” comes from the Latin educare, which means “to draw out”. Becoming educated is to be drawn out of yourself into new territory, to move from ignorance to understanding.

The aims of a liberal education can, of course, seem overly conservative. Why preserve the past? Aren’t our students going to be living in an ever-changing present? It seems to suggest that the grown-ups have all the answers, and we just need to hand them over to the kids. It seems to suggest answers come from the past, not the present or future.

Worse, liberal education can be condemned for being imperialistic. Which cultural treasures are we sharing? Whose culture are we passing on? If my historical education was anything to go by, the only things that happened overseas in the past were wars in which the British were victorious. Thankfully, the curriculum has changed shape a lot since then, but it is easy to say “cultural treasures” without realising just how exclusive that can be.

Knowledge and power

At the beginning of his career, Michael Young very much felt this way about the transmission of knowledge, seeing it as passing on “the knowledge of the powerful”. Cultural treasures can be secret handshakes that let you into certain clubs rather than keys that unlock doors to understanding. No wonder some value this knowledge, and some don’t. For some, it is their inheritance; for some, it is yet another way to feel alienated and dispossessed.

Famously, though, he changed his mind about how important it is to pass knowledge on to the next generation.

Young realised that some knowledge is not simply knowledge of the powerful, but powerful knowledge, knowledge that allows students to enter the world able to interact with it, respond to it, and be directed towards the truth. Sharing the best of what humanity has achieved is not backward looking. It is about handing on the baton to the next generation, saying, “Here’s where we’ve got to - let’s see what you can do now”.

So, is the “sharing” culture of today helping or hindering in this aim? Does it lead us out of ignorance and towards truth?

Plenty of people have spoken about the echo-chamber effect of social media; that it reflects back at you only what people similar to you already think. Looking at my social media accounts, for example, it would be hard to believe that anyone at all voted for Brexit, doesn’t think we should eat less meat or is sceptical about climate change. Social media reflects back to me a world full of people quite like me, with views quite like mine, with similar educational backgrounds, at similar stages of life. What my friends share are the sorts of things people like me share, and that people like me are likely to pass on. The experience is the opposite of what I experienced as a teenager. Rather than making new discoveries by being exposed to unfamiliar territory, it’s just same old, same old.

I often think that my generation has been luckiest in terms of its place in the internet revolution. I’m 34, and that means that, while I had dial-up internet in my teens, I remember a time before it, and I grew up not using it. I’m exactly the age not to feel this technology is alien, yet I know life without it.

It is because I’m just the right age that I feel I can have one foot in and one foot out of this way of living. Our students, on the other hand, are wholly in it. For many, it is the means by which they are acquiring news, political analysis and culture.

Memes to an end

“Meme” is now a word so familiar that we forget its origins. Memes are to culture what genes are to humanity. Like genes, they are little atoms of information, and they want to be replicated. A meme doesn’t care if it is valuable, nor does it care if it’s true. It cares only that it is shareable.

The most shareable memes - a video of how much of the food we buy is fake, or a poem about loving your cat - are easy wins. They are shareable because they are easy, clear, have one message, and if they shock us, the shock usually underlines our prejudices. They are appealing because they have a “that’s so true” (or worse still, “that’s so true about me”) factor. They get shared because they affirm what we already think and know, and who we already are.

Memes aren’t new, by the way. They didn’t arrive with social media. We have always passed on easy nuggets of culture. Everyone’s heard “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well”, because knowing and caring who Horatio is is just a bit more trouble. As I said, memes don’t care about truth.

But some things are more worth sharing than others. I don’t want to sound like a snob, but I think that if I just sat down and got past the translator’s introduction to the Homer’s Odyssey, I would ultimately get more out of it than if I watched yet another video of a man falling in a hole.

The things really worth sharing, paradoxically, are not very “shareable” in the meme sense. Cultural treasure is not always easy; sometimes it’s unclear, and it requires interpretation. It means hearing voices from the past, not just from your social media circle. It’s challenging, and it can be really hard work.

There are interesting questions we could ask about what this means for our teaching. Do our cultural treasures need to be packaged up into something shareable (in both senses)? No. That is not the answer. It is our role to present students with complexity, to let them grapple with it. Indeed, not to expose them to complexity is to underestimate them, in fact, to sell them short. If we make what students learn too meme-like, it will be just as instantly appealing and just as instantly forgettable as another video of a guilty dog.

So, in this culture of sharing, the role of teachers to share cultural treasure is greater than ever. If we share with students the best of the world, they can find it, they can read about it, they can watch videos about it. But our role is crucial in breaking that echo chamber and bringing in something new.

Clare Jarmy is head of RS and philosophy at Bedales School, Hampshire

This article originally appeared in the 12 July 2019 issue under the headline “The next generation game”