Mozart Won’t Make You Smart (But Rap Will Make You Dumb)
Spencer J. Quinn2,340 words
After listening to Greg Johnson’s recent conversation with Rob Kievsky entitled “Leveraging Social Decline,” in particular, the part of it in which they discuss parenting, I (being a parent) felt the need to weigh in. Around the 47-minute mark, the two got into a friendly dispute over the best way to be a parent. In reality, I think both were presenting sides that seemed antithetical but really weren’t because they were each addressing different problems with their arguments.
The difference was over high-investment versus low-investment parenting. Kievsky promoted the former and provided all sorts of practical examples which show that kids who are pushed by their parents are more likely to succeed. Johnson, on the other hand, pointed to the inevitability of genetics and indicated that high-investment parenting might not in the end matter as much as we think. Of course, they are both right. I do believe, however, they both left a few things out that could reconcile their positions and which are crucial to raising children, especially these days.
Johnson got the ball rolling by mentioning the nature-versus-nurture debate and plopping down hard for the former:
The more we know about genetics, the more we realize that nurture doesn’t matter . . . Nature is stronger than nurture . . . All these books on parenting say play Mozart to your baby, read to them and all this other kinds of stuff. It will make them smarter. Actually, it doesn’t. There is no evidence that it actually makes your kids smarter . . . But if you are a brilliant person and you pass on brilliant genes and you have genes for industriousness and curiosity and agency, your kids are going to have that too. And you can actually sit back and be a laissez-faire parent and things are probably going to work out pretty much the same as if you were a high-investment helicopter parent.
When asked by Kievsky to clarify his position, he went on to say, “I think if you give your kids a lot of opportunities and let them go, that might actually be enough.”
“Don’t you think you gotta push them when they are young, though?” Kievsky asked.
Johnson then expressed some ambivalence to this. He explained that nurture is not nothing, and that parents should provide their children with opportunities as well as an orderly environment, good food, good books, edifying games, etc. Most importantly, he says, parents should immunize their children against a corrupt culture by instilling in them a sense of taste. This was basically the crux of his argument and likewise an elegant way of looking at one of the great challenges of parenting.
Again, he was correct. However, I will argue that instilling in children a sense of taste, that is, an understanding and appreciation of what is elegant and beautiful, requires exactly the kind of pushing that Kievsky promotes. In a fallen world, taste doesn’t come easy. Kievsky describes kids who are “parent-oriented” as being on a better footing than those who are “peer-oriented.” Such kids will more likely carry on their parents’ sense of taste because of the greater interaction they have with their parents, often achieved through intense churching or home schooling. However, most parents, for whatever reason, cannot homeschool and must rely on public or private education for their kids. What then? What typically happens is that, over time, parent-oriented kids become peer-oriented kids. This is a natural progression for most kids, especially teenagers. Such is the tradeoff parents must be prepared for when they sacrifice close contact with their kids for their careers and extra income.
Unlike most parents, kids, in many ways, are their social lives. How popular they are, how good they are at sports, how many friends they have, how many kids they can afford not to be friends with, and how successful they are with the opposite sex often means a lot more to them than their AP history term paper or what they scored on their math exam. In other words, for the vast majority of kids who are not homeschooled or heavily churched, popularity is capital, and school is, first and foremost, a competition to see who can acquire the most of it. Losing this competition, as I am sure we all know, hurts. In such an environment, ‘taste’, such as it is, quickly becomes a race to the bottom. It can be no other way, given that ‘high school cool’ aims to be as broad as possible and therefore must always court the lowest common cultural denominator. For a society in which artistic trendsetters spring from the small literate fraction of the population and the majority of the popular music is only one or two steps away from the church, this is not necessarily bad. The bottom in this case is still relatively high. But in a society shared with a large black population whose music, arts, and letters tend to be simple-minded, prurient, vulgar, and (especially recently) violent, that bottom line has gotten lower than we could ever have imagined.
In my article, “A White Nationalist Take on Rock and Roll,” I discussed Allan Bloom’s take on rock and roll, which was primarily an outgrowth of black musical forms such as rhythm and blues:
So how is rock ‘n’ roll sexy? Allan Bloom had a lot to say about it in his famous The Closing of the American Mind from 1987. He called rock ‘n’ roll “barbaric” and wrote that “has the beat of sexual intercourse.” Basically, rock ‘n’ roll stirs up sexual desires which threaten to control us and turn us into heathens, more or less. One cannot live a noble life, controlling one’s passions and appreciating intellectual pleasures, while listening exclusively to the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, and their ilk, according to Bloom.
If white parents wish to instill a sense of taste in our peer-oriented children in order to inoculate them against the cultural corrosion Bloom discusses, we must find ways to overcome the pervasive, bottom-feeding influence of popular culture. If your child has an IQ of 130 or higher, that might not be too difficult since he will have the innate mental agility to at least recognize the beauty in the things his parents will present to him. But since most kids, even the good ones, will be to some extent peer-oriented, instilling a sense of taste in them will require work, or “pushing” as Kievsky calls it. Mozart, Da Vinci, and Shakespeare won’t be able to do this by themselves since the yawning breach of centuries of culture will be too wide. How can a fifteen-year-old boy stir his heart listening to Mozart when he is constantly tempted to shake his hips to the latest hit from Pharrell Williams? How can Shakespeare say a thing of relevance to a fourteen-year-old girl when social media offers scandalous insider knowledge that can enhance her social standing at school?
But if pushing your children is the answer, how do you push without being pushy?
You can season it to taste, of course, but here is the formula I have been following for well over a decade to good effect so far:
1. Start early. Make it so that by the time your kid is ten he will have no memory of what it was like not having a classical education of some sort at home, on top of his regular schooling. When habits form before memory does, they will be very hard to break.
2. Insist that the child be classically trained in a musical instrument from age five until the day they go off to college. But not the guitar and not the drums. Of course, if they want to pick up either of these, that’s fine. But given their ubiquity in pop music, the guitar or drums should never supplant the piano, violin, clarinet, or any other proper orchestral instrument. Exceptions should be made, of course, for the classical guitar or if one’s little genius looks like he might become the next Neil Peart.
Aside from filling their heads with elegant music and training their minds to ape the creative function of great musical minds, playing classical music will also give white kids a sense of racial pride like almost nothing else. Parents shouldn’t beat a dead horse over this last point, of course. But they shouldn’t let their kids forget it either.
3. Insist the child not only read poetry, but memorize it. By the time they enter college verses from at least a couple dozen classic poems should be figure skating in their minds. There are plenty of introductory poetry books out there that can get kids started quite painlessly. Richard Wilbur’s Some Opposites is a good example of quality, kid-friendly poetry. The best, in my opinion, is the absolutely wonderful “The People Upstairs” by Ogden Nash. This little poem is so remarkable I feel the need to reproduce it here. There are very few kids who won’t appreciate the clever twist at the end.
“The People Upstairs” by Ogden Nash
The people upstairs all practice ballet.
Their living room is a bowling alley.
Their bedroom is full of conducted tours.
Their radio is louder than yours.
They celebrate weekends all the week.
When they take a shower, your ceilings leak.
They try to get their parties to mix
By supplying their guests with pogo sticks.
And when their fun at lasts abates
They go to the bathroom on roller skates.
I might love the people upstairs wondrous
If instead of above us, they just lived under us.
4. Play classical music as often as possible. Like any art form, some of it is more conducive to child-rearing than others. In general, stick to the shorter, lighter, catchier stuff and leave the heavy, sublime material for later. I’m sure nothing can turn some poor kid off to classical music more than subjecting him to hours of Wagner or Bruckner. Instead, here is a list of pithy pieces that young kids can get into with only a reasonable amount of effort. Please add more in the comments section if you know of any.
Bach – Minuet in G Major
Beethoven – Piece for Mandolin (without opus)
Bizet – Les Toreadors
Denza – Funiculi Funicula
Dvořák – Humoresque
Fucik – Entry of the Gladiators
Grieg – In the Hall of the Mountain King
Khachaturian – Sabre Dance
Mozart – A Little Night Music
Mozart – Piano Sonata #11 Rondo Alla Turca
Mozart – Piano Sonata #16 Allegro
Offenbach – Can-Can #3 and #4
Rossini – William Tell Overture Finale
Saint-Saëns – The Elephant
Schumann – The Merry Peasant
Suppe – Light Cavalry Overture
Tchaikovsky – Trepak from the Nutcracker
Tchaikovsky – Spanish Dance from Swan Lake
Tchaikovsky – Neapolitan Dance from Swan Lake
Vivaldi – Spring from the Four Seasons (Allegro)
A playlist of these and others can go a long way, especially in car rides.
In 2006 Disney released a feature-length Mickey, Donald, and Goofy spoof of The Three Musketeers. The movie itself is fine, but the soundtrack consists of nothing but classical pieces sung in verse by the characters. There is no better way to get kids to remember classical music than through funny lyrics. One song, called “Petey’s King of France” (a brilliant send-up of “In the Hall of the Mountain King”), you just have to experience. I challenge anyone to tell me that this rendition of this song would not make the perfect gateway drug for the world of classical music.
As a corollary to this, if classical music is not your thing, then anything that isn’t the corrosive pop music we hear these should do just as well for inoculation purposes. Vintage country or folk, PG-rated classic rock, bluegrass, polka, show tunes, religious music, pretty much anything that isn’t the degenerate, mass-marketed pop that is so popular these days. When kids get exposure to enough of this kind of thing, they will be more likely to have the taste to recognize today’s pop for what it is.
5. Never play rap and stay away from popular black music in general. By all means, listen to Kathleen Battle singing Fauré’s Requiem or Wynton Marsalis tearing up Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major. Or even Ray Charles hitting all the right notes in his beautiful version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” That stuff is great. But black popular music tends to sink to the lowest common denominator discussed above. Little effort is required to follow along, so the mind does not develop as much as it would when trying understand and appreciate classical music. Even in some of its best incarnations, such as Dixieland jazz, popular black music tends to celebrate the release of wild passions which is not really conducive to civilized life. Compare Count Basie’s rendition of the standard “1 O’Clock Jump” to Lawrence Welk’s. The white version is much more restrained and civilized (“the squarest thing this side of Euclid,” as one critic put it), whereas the black version really jumps. It’s got that jungle rhythm, you know.
R&B and, later, rock and roll took this unrestrained quality and gave it a sexual edge. Rap and hip-hop have given it anger and violence. None of this is good, and none of this should be in our homes with our children listening.
There is another reason to keep black musical forms out of our homes. It’s not as nice, but it is just as valid. We, as white advocates, separatists, nationalists, what have you, envision a world in which we don’t have to be around these people. We recognize racial differences as well as the net negative impact blacks have on society despite their musical ability. We would frankly rather do without them. Instilling an appreciation of black musical forms into children at an early age works against this. To a child, it may also seem a tad hypocritical on the parent’s part.
Years ago, The Onion did a not-bad piece entitled “Affluent White Man Enjoys, Causes the Blues.” It’s not quite like that. But to an impressionable kid, it sure could seem that way.
Rob Kievsky was correct when he said that parents should push their children. Greg Johnson was also correct when he said that Mozart won’t somehow magically make a child smarter than his genetics would dictate. But putting the time and effort into learning how to appreciate classic and classical music forms certainly can make a kid develop his mind. So, kids who really enjoy Mozart at an early age may seem smarter than other kids because they are, in effect, farther along in reaching their potential. They will also have developed that all important sense of taste, thanks in no small part to their parents for pushing them along.
18 comments
I remember an audio of Leo Yankevich where he woefully remarks that his kids listened to rap music and laments that there was nothing he could do about it. It was kind of funny, actually.
I don’t think there’s anything you can do to stop them from listening to what they want to hear, but by playing your stuff you can help them at least not be opposed to it. If you provide anyone a basket of goods, he’ll choose his favorite relative to the others–that’s what Jews understand as they exert cultural/political hegemony–so kids will inevitably select their favorite classical pieces if you play a series of them.
It is important to try to influence your kids after puberty. Scientists tell us that people’s sense of hearing is more acute when they’re teenagers and in their early 20s. They have a wider range of pitch, and music hits their ears in such a way that it is more exhilarating for the brain. This is why people always have such strong nostalgia for the music they heard when they were teenagers. The music industry understands this and markets its stuff primarily to teens, and there’s no reason parents shouldn’t likewise attempt to influence them at this age. It makes sense that young adults would have greater music appreciation because music is an outgrowth of primordial human mating calls, and young adulthood is prime time for mating as far as evolutionary history is concerned.
Introverts with high IQ tend to like classical, but if your kid isn’t one of those then you could probably hit him with some traditional European tunes he’d like just as much. There’s some great Christmas carols and songs from before the 20th century that can really hit the soul. There’s Civil war songs like Johnny Come Marching Home Again and Dixie, revolutionary war songs like Yankee Doodle–which if done right sounds cool, and moving old hymns like Wondrous Love, etc. Every European ethnic group has produced endless examples of traditional music.
I liked more sensational classical music in my teens, and I imagine sensational stuff appeals more to the young, so if you can comb ancient music for its most sensational works then your kids might find it appealing. I liked Bizet’s Carmen in high school, which is quite sensational. Vivaldi’s four seasons are pretty sensational. Any Best of CD of Beethoven or Mozart will feature their most catchy stuff.
At the same time, though, I think kids should be able to “ride the tiger” so to speak and not be put off by pop music too much. Yes, it’s inferior. Yes, it probably has subtle bad influences on society, ruining a people’s sense of sobriety and making them more amenable to their race’s decline. But a young man has to find an attractive girl, and chances are he won’t woo her in a place where Mozart is playing in the background. Ideally he would, but life often fails to be ideal.
Nevertheless it’s important to maintain ideals and appreciation for ideal music. Just play your music passively in the car and show them your natural affinity for it. They’ll pick out what they like.
And one final thing, I went to a metal concert with my friends recently which had very high decibel levels, and ever since then I’ve wanted more volume in music. I wonder if it reorganized my music appreciation tastes somehow. Anyway, let them ride the tiger, but not if it is so loud that it damages their range of pitch and thus ability to appreciate finer forms of musical expression and perhaps by relation human sentiment.
Exactly. Classical music is to me like the musical equivalent of great architectural feats like the Colosseum. Unparalleled in beauty and grandeur, but not suitable for day to day living. That’s why I don’t agree with those who insist that all modern music must be thrown out in favour of traditional European art music. Genres like metal, folk-rock, grunge (yes), and even the more “chill” forms of electronic music now brought under the category of “vaporwave” are all expressions of the White soul, tailored to the modern world as young Whites have experienced it. By playing classical music all the time, and in every setting, the power of the music not only diminishes, but if you live in an environment surrounded by multicultural and cultural marxist ugliness, by listening to European art music in that setting you from associations between the music and the surroundings which ultimately rob the music of its uplifting quality. Harsh and aggressive, but eminently White-souled music like metal can be a cleansing experience from the daily poz.
While my experience has been to the contrary, I believe that it still proves your point. I have found classical music to be a source of great solace and strength when faced with ugliness. In fact, when I’m in a beautiful and calm environment, whether natural or built, am less inclined to mediate the experience with music.
But this is only possible because I already had a firm template upon which to build those associations, something that I think is of crucial importance.
I’m currently fighting modernity with choral and organ music, particularly Requiem masses. I find a thundering organ voluntary powerful enough to counter pretty much anything the modern world can throw at me.
I would make a tree analogy: a small scrub tree will never reach the stature of a great sequoia, no matter how much it’s tended, but there are a whole heck of a lot of failings that could prevent a sequoia from reaching its full majesty!
I don’t agree with getting children to memorize light joke lyrics, although I would agree that memorizing poetry is conducive to learning and acculturation. Of course, then there comes the decision of agreeing upon a proper canon, which in this day would be fraught with cultural Marxist diversity entries, like getting eight year olds to memorize Ginsburg, I would imagine. My own suggestion would be the classical “school room poets”, Longfellow, Bryant, jr lowell. In fact, that’s why they were named that! A key poem might be The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Longfellow. Here is artistry, tinctured with patriotism of an innocent sort. We can no longer enjoy these figures bc they were so white and the civilization to which they gave the founding myth is to be stomped into oblivion, but no figures of comparable imagination and poetic skill have arisen to sing the founding myths of diversity, hence poetry is irrelevant to the curriculum. Also I would surmise that the medium of the pound/Eliot monsters has to be eclipsed.
Nevertheless, I would ask for some diversity to be introduced into the canon. I have been reading Henry Timrod, poet laureate of the Confederacy, and some of his lyrics fit into this tradition well. It will guard our children against bigotry by showing there are two sides to every issue! I would like to craft a little ebook for conservatives, a propositional canon for the altright.
I would like to point out that we Whites need forms to express masculinity and sexuality. I doubt that our expression of that is via classical music; which form it is, I don´t really know.
Now the point is, that, as per bell curve distribution, “sexual” expression has become a black thing. Same as for blacks, doing well in school is a White thing.
The solution, as is clear to everybody (everybody who doesn´t malignantly play dumb in these questions), is race-segregation. The negroes themselves know that and demand that, in their safe-spaces. It´s obvious.
But the point is: just because the negroes have monopolized masculinity and sexual aggressiveness wtih their cultural expressions, doesn´t mean that that is off limits for Whites. We need our own cultural expressions in these areas. It´s important to keep that in mind, and to not consider these parts of life as something inferior because it´s usually connected with blacks (actually, the deification of the Non-White has exactly that reason: we Whites tend to be much in the mind, and not in the feeling, and the Non-White is seen as a liberator from that mind-prison. It is, IMO, clearly a cultural quirk of us Whites, and we need to deal with it but certainly not by feeling inferior and deifying Non-Whites).
All good advice.
Cultural snob who has only ever heard (((mainstream))) rap talks down entire genre by garbage he has heard on the radio, news at 11.
As Aurelio says above: rap is a fundamentally Black type of music. I’m a Millennial so I went through the obligatory phase of listening to rap and hip-hop, including both mainstream and more obscure artists. That lasted about a year before I stopped listening that stuff, and have never looked back since. When I hear rap music playing now, especially in historic White nations in Europe that have their own, infinitely-superior musical traditions, I just feel like vomiting out my ears.
Are you sure rock and roll is derived from black music.A lot of rythym and blues would put you to sleep. Rock and roll owes a lot to country music with its jigs and reels.
True, but my hunch is that without the influence of the more sexual black music forms, rock and roll would not have been as rebellious and as noteworthy as it was. It would have garnered much less mainstream attention, sort of like bluegrass, which combined old timey country music with jazz.
I’d also recommend nationalist inspired classical such as Sibelius’ Finlandia.
There’s no question that rap music is an expression of the black racial soul, and contains all the problems that the early critics of rock n roll talked about, times one hundred. Whereas rock is a mix of melody and rhythm, rap eschews melody entirely for hypnotic beats. This is part of what makes it so effective as a medium for conveying ideas, albeit simple ideas – it’s musical rhetoric.
The issue of rap music will need to be addressed because ever since its ascendancy to the mainstream at the end of the 20th century, kids have grown up with it. We even have white nationalist rappers now – Mr. Bond. There are so many words and phrases that originated in black America which were adopted by whites, and only those of us old enough to remember have any awareness of them. And it goes back longer than my generation. Ever called something “cool?” Congrats, you’re speaking Ebonics. In the early 20th century, Jung said that Americans were already spiritually part black because of the influence of black culture. The jazz craze of the 20s began as a black music phenomenon, and white kids in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s generation ate it up.
If your kids like rap, it’s not the end of the world. Some rap music is better than others, in terms of lyrical and musical quality, but all of it is fundamentally black, even if it’s made by a white guy like Eminem. There’s nothing wrong with appreciating an expression of another race’s soul – white kids just need to realize that it will never belong to them, and they need to discover their own identity and forms of expression. I hope that white kids who are into the hip hop subculture can eventually grow out of it as they grow more into their own identity and culture. But older whites have to create a culture that will have more appeal to them. I think the alt right is slowly doing that.
In the 80s and early 90s, being a “wigger” who listened to rap music was to be a laughable outcast. Then it went mainstream, and has been ever since. Part of the reason is that rap music projects a rough and strong masculinity, which stands in stark contrast to much popular white music. I think it’s no coincidence that the dominant forms of white music in the 80s and 90s were hair metal and grunge. Hair metal had a masculine sound, but the men were basically cross-dressers, while grunge was just whiny and weak. What came after grunge was even worse. The stage was set for rap to take over, and it did.
For light, approachable classical, Chopin’s solo piano pieces are good (I don’t think any are longer than 5 min). Also Strauss waltzes. The Swiss state classical music station (Radio Swiss Classic) plays this kind of stuff exclusively. They have web streaming and mobile apps, and no talking except to say what was played. (If you play attention you can learn the German words for musical things.)
Instrumental, melodic electronic music can be good too, stuff like this – https://youtu.be/1Ee8ynh4wLw
Many excellent points in this piece. I’d agree with the idea that the kid with the 130+ IQ will eventually come into his or her own… *generally* speaking. There are, of course, those who either fall to or never rise from the solace of numbing distractions from their outlier existence, be they pharmacological or technological (internet posting, gaming, etc.). Musical exposure (or the lack thereof) plays an impossible-to-overstate role in determining a child’s future. Sure, classical music is far more cerebral than other genres and is more likely to stimulate the intellect. But the far more important benefits and dangers of music are – as discussed by Quinn – emotional and spiritual. Classical music can inspire greatness, but I’ve never seen anything “great” (in the positive sense) catalyzed by exposure to rap. Vulgarity and baseness are not the stuff of which civilizations are made.
My parents provided piano lessons to all of us, but as a child, I wasn’t sufficiently persistent to continue, and my laziness got the better of me at about the age of nine years. I didn’t have much exposure to classical music until my late teens; until then, it was mostly pop and a disturbing (at least, in hindsight) amount of Eminem. That said, I credit the strong antipathy my parents had toward rap (based not on racial sentiments, but on disgust with content) with my eventual (re)discovery of the beauty of classical music. Rap and other degenerate musical forms darken the soul. I challenge even the casual listener of classical music to try following a Beethoven piece with a rap song. It doesn’t work. It feels like splashing Kool-Aid over a freshly-cleaned carpet.
As an aside, I’d argue a bit against an extremely high-investment parenting style, because it almost invariably leads to fewer children. I have never understood how it became the Western (White) way to have two children and a dog. I have five siblings, and if I had only one sibling, I wouldn’t feel as though I were part of a family. Whites need to have 4-5 children/couple. Nurturing 1-2 children like delicate flowers is not the way to build or take back a society.
Also, to say one more thing, I think parenting is an interesting topic, worthy of more posts; it is very close to the fundamental question “What is the good life?” (for children); and also the subject of rhythm vs. melody in music, it is both a stylistic and deep philosophical question.
Although in general music where melody has the upper-hand is more noble, it is also possibly more melancholy and effeminate. Rhythm communicates more directly with the lower appetites, yes — but these appetites have their place in the natural order, in particular in war. The Negros and Jews have used rhythm for mostly sexual purposes, but it can also rouse men to battle.
It should therefore be used with discretion, and imparted to boys (not girls, since they will interpret it differently — they will compete to mate with the alpha male rather than compete to be the most beneficial to the unit) only with a certain grimness, as you might teach them to clean and shoot a gun, but not take too much pleasure in doing so. “We only have to do this (sigh) because the heathens have not yet seen the light — pray that they will soon, my son, and then we can go back to tending the farm and contemplating the light as the monks do.”
The faggots and Jews at the BBC were apparently asleep and allowed this documentary to be made, “Pipers of the Trenches” – https://youtu.be/toy7A8rbZZU (it does kind of make them look like outdated relics, but still)
Scotland the Brave – https://youtu.be/umzRoqtWvrA
O’Sullivan’s March – https://youtu.be/_fTjajkPGOk (possibly a bit too “merry” for a military march?)
The Jew fears the (“postmodern”) Samurai – https://youtu.be/7nN3veRaf8k https://youtu.be/FKlNgqZLe6E
Why the Holy See suppressed paganism (degenerate rhythm, never heard Palestrina): https://youtu.be/_fTjajkPGOk
the last link should be this: https://youtu.be/TIXV2NhLb_0
Some more (to start with) for the kids’ classical music list:
Chopin’s Minute Waltz
“Mars” and “Jupiter” from Gustav Holst’s Planets.
Rossini – The Thieving Magpie
Rossini – The Barber of Seville
Léo Delibes – Sylvia – Pizzicato
Ponchielli – Dance of the Hours
Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf
Bach -Toccata and Fugue
Don’t be afraid to throw in some sombre stuff. Nothing makes an impression on you as a kid as the things which come off as imposing and powerful, yet intriguing. Also, just show them the fantastic Disney film Fantasia. Got me hooked on classical since I was old enough to watch television.
I think you make some good points about listening to classical music etc. at home, but I think you underestimate the power of looking up to your parents and classical art as is. Most kids will still do as their parents even if their classmates do otherwise. There migth be some stormy seas during puberty, but the child will eventually settle back down. More often than not anyway. And Shakespear’s stories will definitely touch a 14 year old girl’s heart, it’s the language that’s problematic. So just get her a modern translation (one you reviewed and found it doesn’t twist the story).
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