It is undoubtedly the case that we absorb the culture we’re around. We pick up cues – intentional and not – from those around us, particularly our authorities: parents, teachers, leaders. We absorb the culture and then we reflect it back.
So it is that we can affect our students and our children by making a conscious effort to expose them to the culture that we want them to reflect. It’s legend in my family that my dad would play Mahler, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich in his work room when my siblings and I were young – a work room that shared a wall with our basement playroom.
More recently, I caught my own sons singing along, almost unwittingly, to both David Yazbek’s revelatory score to The Band’s Visit and with Kurt Elling’s setting of Jaco Pastorius’s Three Views of A Secret. In neither case is the music easy to understand – but given time, they’re singing along as if it’s Raffi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G71Zwn9s9vw
We can affect the culture best by affecting the kind of culture those around us consume.