Why do 18-20 year olds (and younger) not know the classics?

Yes...yes she does.

 

I'm talking musically. Seriously, I don't remember a whole lot going on musically. Everything else? Yeah, but we can't talk about it.

 

BLACK & WHITE

 

We're in Visual Arts so this better be about visual and NOT music.

I was born in 1959 and never had old movies pushed on me, my parents/grandparents never watched much for movies or TV actually, yet the bulk of my favorites starts with the tail end of the silent era and runs to about 1980. I have movies I like from the 80's to now, but the sheer volume of what I enjoy the most and have in my collection resides in about 1929 to 1979. Is that odd or unusual? I don't think so as I find many folks my age like minded. When I was a kid I stayed up for the late late late movie hoping for a great, really old B&W movie, I just dug stuff like that, it resonated with me. I guess I have an old soul.

But if you insist, my music tastes run in very similar eras as to my movies.

 

The great success of Turner Classic Movies proves we're not alone. I think it's now the only channel that shows entire movies with no commercial breaks. I don't know how they pay their bills, maybe Ted Turner just writes a check every month, but it's a national treasure on a par with the Smithsonian.

 

Everyone my age quotes the internet to appear as if they know things. Me...I grew up having access to much of nothing and pilfered from every old film textbook, theory book, history text I could find in dusty library stacks. TCM was a godsend for me but always scheduled the great stuff at 3 am on Wednesdays...so there was a lot of sneaking up involved.
There aren't many who passionately care in this day and age. When you can constantly stream things to your phone and the general consensus is moving images are throwaway pieces of product...being the one who ruminates on pictures on a daily basis gets quite lonely.

 

I have several co-workers born around 1990 that are oblivious to any movies or tv from before Y2K. They all agree with each other that this is normal for their generation. The subject came up in a department meeting.

 

Exactly. Some pop culture endures longer than others and some continue on into a pantheon of "classics" but, again, that doesn't mean most folks know them.

As to critical thinking skills, that, sadly, bit the dust a generation or so back as some student still graduate from college (and high school) without this basic skill.

 

Not even 1/100th as good as the 1960s. Trust me. I know little kids who grew up in the 1990s and they saw far more grief and misery in that decade than I was ever aware of in the 1960s. The sixties were far more fun and innocent, even as the decade grew dark and war and death took over the news. The music, the TV, the culture, everything reached a peak boil in the 1960s and everything that's come after that pales by comparison.

There are millennials who get the classics, in terms of great films, great music, great TV, and so on. I know of 20-somethings who are huge Beatles and Beach Boys fans, so they get that there was a lot of great music back in the day.

Though I've also run into some incredibly racist and sexist 20-year-olds that spout out stuff so dumb, it'd make your head explode. Trust me, there's no age limit on stupidity.

The biggest problem I run into with people under 30 is that too often, they have no clue about what they don't know. They believe the container of knowledge they have is enough, and they have no sense how great and wide the universe is outside the boundaries. As the great philosopher Barbra Streisand once sang, "the more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know." The earlier you understand this, the better off you'll be.

 

Geez, you're already a geezer at 26?

 

Sister Disco seems to be well into her (?) dodderhood.

 

Whats 'classic' is redefined over time. Kids today are fundamentally no different than we were. Take crazy parties or sex for example. Every generation believes they invented them.

 

They know far more about music from 50 years ago than I knew in the 70s about music from the 20s.

 

Guess it all depends on where one was situated in a given time. Getting up close and personal with the civil rights movement at its peak was amazing. However, it was also scary and often tragic and loaded with unintended consequences. I certainly had more fun in the 1990's, fewer hard times. My 1960's were less innocent, less fun. In the 60's I was listening to top 40 on a pocket transistor radio, in the 1990's I was recording 'Early Music', classical music of all sorts, some world music on audiophile gear. My musical world was greater in the 1990s than the 1960s. Let's not over-mythologize the 1960's. There's a lot of things that evolved after the 1960s. There were plenty of cultural peaks before the 1960s as well.

"Stop thinking and end your problems."

Tao te Ching Lao Tzu, trans. Stephen Mitchell,

 

I am in my late 20's. My parents right around 50.

I asked them, If they thought their time growing up was better or special or different.
They both said, looking back it seemed like it was, but at the time really no.
So maybe after several years, parents lose their objectivity and only remember things being good for the most part.
I guess things look better in retrospect to all kids that grow up and are no longer kids.
What they grew up with they feel is special, but maybe more special cause it was when they grew up.

 

Hey! Still under 30 here, lol.
The biggest laugh I get from people my parents age, is they tend to think everything they like should be liked by all.
I can not attribute that personality type to my generation!

 

Judging by your name I assume we're around the same age, and many of my fellow X'ers didn't care for old movies either (and still don't, as far as I know). Not surprising, as people usually like contemporary production values and style in their pop art. I'm not particularly into a lot of older movies either, mainly because I find the stagey, somewhat stiff pre-Method style of acting to be a bit off-putting.

 

Simply put, public education intends to do away with the classics, replacing them with instant gratification.

 

Or, as some students always say, public education is there to increase their "self of steam".

 

It does seem to be emblematic of our late teens and twenties to believe that our experience is authoritative. Unfortunately, I've seen that behavior in people into their 30s, 40s and 50s, who can't seem to separate opinion from fact. You hope that you eventually gain some measure of humility as you age and have new experiences, accepting that there might be things others know that you don't, but some people don't seem to have the capacity for humility. I connect all of this to insecurity, which practically runs us when we're young adults.

The root of this thread, though, is a combination of nostalgia and narrow vision. Most of us with reasonably normal upbringings sentimentalize and romanticize our childhoods: we were safe, we were free of responsibility and we discovered new things every day. Of course that will seem like the best time ever when we look back from an adult vantage point.

 

I grew up in the 80s and when I was a teen I didn't care about music/movies from before "my time" either. Being a hard rock/metal fan, there was so much "new" stuff coming out at that time that I had enough trouble just keeping up with that, never mind bothering to dig back into so called "older" bands.
When grunge rock came along and pretty much wiped everything I liked off the map in the 90s, **then** I had time to start going backwards.

 

I grew up watching old movies on TV and I've always had an appreciation of history and how things developed. I was a film buff at a very early age (pre-teen) and started reading books on filmmaking when I was around 8 or 9. It also probably helped that we didn't own a color TV until 1982, so I had no problems watching B&W movies. The production and acting styles don't bother me, I view them in context with the time the films were made and see it as a necessary building block in the history of cinema.

 

Memory is a funny thing. Many people around my age(59) seem to think that everything was just wonderful when we were kids, as memory tends to be selective and we remember the god things about growing up. I've been on Brooklyn nostalgia sites and some folks even grew up near me and don't remember a lot of things that were not positive.
I guess I'm an outlier as I remember a lot of it, negative as well as positive. I did have a lot of fun as a kid.

 

Haha!!
I remember this comic, of an old grandfather sitting in a chair ranting on and on:

"Back then Candy was a Penny, a phone call was a nickel, and a loaf of bread was a dime!"
His wife rolls her eyes and says:
"Elmer when we got our first house you were only making $1.29 an hour!"
He replies back:
"Really?" With a confused look on his face.

 

Yet!