The Stories We Teach Kids Become the Civilization They Inherit

Nobody knows their own history or culture by magic.

That may sound obvious, but it’s one of those truths that our society seems determined to forget. 

Children don’t spontaneously discover Shakespeare, Homer, Bach, Beethoven, Frederick Douglass, George Washington, Jane Austen, Michelangelo, Aesop, the Bible, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the Civil War, or the basic moral architecture of Western civilization by doomscrolling TikTok long enough.

They have to be consciously, deliberately introduced to these things.

And usually, they have to be introduced by people who already know and love them.

That’s what elders are for. Parents, grandparents, teachers, pastors, neighbors, librarians, coaches, and yes, even writers, animators, filmmakers, and game designers. Every generation inherits a world it did not build. The question is whether the previous generation bothers to explain what that world is, where it came from, and why any of it matters.

Unfortunately, we have often confused “explanation” with “assignment.”

Read this book. Memorize these dates. Write this essay. Take this test.

Academic rigor is important, and rote memorization does have a critical place in people’s intellectual development, but if the first time a young person encounters Homer, Dante, Dickens, Shakespeare, Locke, or Lincoln is as a dead item on a checklist, we probably shouldn’t be shocked when they conclude that all of civilization before 2016 was just boring homework with worse Wi-Fi.

But that’s not how a culture survives.

Stories Shape Our Culture

Cultures survive when the old stories are shared and transmitted to the next generation, often by embedding them inside new stories younger people actually want to consume.

This is one of the great underappreciated virtues of popular entertainment. Cartoons, children’s books, movies, TV shows, musicals, comics, and video games are not merely distractions from “real” education. At their best, they can be gateways into it.

For decades, children were surrounded by popular stories that quietly introduced them to the history, myths, music, literature, art, and moral vocabulary of Western civilization. Not perfectly, perhaps. Not always comprehensively. And not always even accurately. But… meaningfully.

Disney built an empire doing this.

Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aladdin, Hercules, Tarzan, Robin Hood, Mulan, and The Jungle Book are not original stories that emerged fully formed from a corporate content strategy meeting in Burbank, CA. They are adaptations, riffs, simplifications, and reinventions of the fairy tales, myths, and legends that long predate modern entertainment.

A child who watches The Hunchback of Notre Dame may not be ready for Victor Hugo. That’s okay. What matters is that thanks to the film, that story might now mean something to him, and when he’s a little older, he may be excited to read the nearly 1,000-page book.

Layers of references.

A child who watches Hercules is obviously not getting a graduate seminar in Greek mythology. But maybe now she’s familiar with the names, images, and archetypes of the gods, monsters, and heroic patterns that permeate that mythology. 

A child who watches Aladdin is not receiving a historically precise education in medieval Middle Eastern storytelling. But he now has an entry point into Scheherazade, The Arabian Nights, and the idea that the world contains ancient stories beyond his own immediate surroundings.

All of that matters.

The same thing was true of classic American animation. Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Hanna-Barbera, Walt Disney, and later Steven Spielberg’s animation projects filled children’s entertainment with references to opera, classical music, literature, old Hollywood, vaudeville, painting, sculpture, mythology, and world history.

Looney Tunes gave kids Wagner through “What’s Opera, Doc?”, they were introduced to Rossini through “The Rabbit of Seville”, and heard Franz Liszt for the first time through “Rhapsody Rabbit”. 

Tom and Jerry did the same kind of thing with “The Cat Concerto”. Disney’s Fantasia practically dared children to associate animation with Bach, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Schubert, and Mussorgsky.

And these weren’t presented as bitter medicine. They were funny. They were beautiful. They were weird and memorable.

A kid did not need to understand the entire Ring Cycle to laugh at Bugs Bunny in a winged helmet singing “Kill the wabbit.” But years later, if that kid heard Wagner again, it wasn’t completely foreign to him. There was already a hook in the mind, and so the touchstones across the entire history of Western Civilization feel familiar and resonant.

The same pattern shows up everywhere.

Old cartoons and sitcoms casually referenced Michelangelo’s David, Rodin’s The Thinker, Don Quixote, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, Romeo and Juliet, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Odyssey, Of Mice & Men, The Bible, Aesop, The Brothers Grimm, King Arthur, and more.

Some references were sophisticated and subtle. Others, less so. But those references were typically shared among most of the adults in the audience while still being entertaining for the kids and younger people who weren’t already familiar with them. This depth creates different degrees of meaning depending on your familiarity with source material, but it’s all in service of a story that everyone is experiencing together.

That’s how cultural memory works.

Children weren’t expected to know all of it. The traditions survived because they were hidden in plain sight, inside the stories, jokes, songs, and characters children already loved.

And it wasn’t only art and literature. Popular entertainment also treated real history—Washington, Napoleon, Cleopatra, Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Franklin, Edison, Churchill, and others—as part of the common vocabulary.

Not always accurately. Sometimes barely accurately. But the names remained alive.

But the point is not that a Bugs Bunny cartoon is a substitute for a serious biography of Napoleon. The point is that a kid who has heard the name Napoleon a hundred times in jokes, parodies, and visual references is far more prepared to learn the real history than a kid for whom Napoleon is just another random dead European in a textbook.

This is also how knowledge accumulates.

Stories Transmit Knowledge from One Generation to the Next

You get a name here, a melody there, an image, a joke, a myth, a painting, a quote, a half-remembered scene, and eventually those fragments start to connect. The world becomes increasingly legible, and the shared references of a society bring people together.

But a lot of modern pop culture has severed those connections.

Today, many stories aimed at young audiences are far more likely to reference other pieces of pop culture from the last 40 or 50 years than the deeper reservoir of human civilization. Star Wars references. Terminator references. Marvel references. Video game references. Meta-jokes about franchises. Nostalgia for yesterday’s nostalgia.

If the only thing our stories reference is other fictional content produced after 1977, we are not transmitting a civilization. We are just building a feedback loop.

A story that references The Terminator may be fun. But a culture that only references The Terminator is in trouble.

Because eventually children grow up knowing fictional universes better than the real one. They can explain the lore of six streaming franchises but not the difference between Athens and Rome, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the American Revolution and the French Revolution, natural rights and civil rights, capitalism and mercantilism, fascism and communism, art and propaganda, or a republic and a democracy.

Then we wonder why they are so easy to manipulate.

This is where the conversation about media literacy becomes important.

Real media literacy is not the ability to repeat whatever ideological interpretation is fashionable online this week. It is not yelling “you missed the point” at strangers because they didn’t interpret a movie through the same political lens as a Media Studies 101 seminar. Nor is it about treating every story as a scavenger hunt for oppression, power dynamics, or confirmation of your priors, as is largely true of Critical Literary Theory.

It requires you to notice what is actually on the page or screen. It requires you to understand structure, character, framing, editing, music, genre, symbolism, and context. But it also requires you to bring something to the table.

In other words, genuine media literacy requires a strong base of knowledge.

If you don’t know anything about history, you will miss historical references. If you don’t know anything about religion, you will miss Biblical allusions. If you don’t know anything about classical music, opera, painting, architecture, literature, economics, civics, or philosophy, then enormous portions of meaning will simply pass through you like radio waves through a brick wall.

Worse, if you don’t know much about reality, it becomes much easier for someone else to sell you a fake version of it.

Knowledge is Power Over Reality

The late master magician and public skeptic James Randi once demonstrated this problem beautifully. He spent years exposing paranormal claims, and one of the most uncomfortable lessons of his work was that very smart people can be fooled very easily outside their domain of expertise. 

Ph.D. researchers who were brilliant in their own fields could watch basic mentalism, spoon-bending, or stage magic and convince themselves they had witnessed something extraordinary because they did not know enough about deception to recognize the trick.

Intelligence is not the same thing as knowledge. Credentials are not the same thing as wisdom. Expertise in one domain does not make you immune to manipulation in another.

The same basic problem shows up in academic hoaxes like Sokal and Sokal Squared; in the replication crisis; and in many failures of peer review. Plausible-sounding nonsense can pass through impressive institutions when it flatters the right assumptions, uses the right jargon, or confirms what the audience already wants to believe.

That is not just an academic problem. It is a human problem.

The less people know that’s actually true, the easier they are to trick with rhetoric that sounds sophisticated, compassionate, scientific, or morally urgent. And the more disconnected people are from history and their own cultural reference points, the less able they are to recognize recycled errors with new branding.

This is why the stories we give young people matter so much.

Stories do not merely entertain us. They shape our instincts. They teach us what is admirable and what is shameful. They tell us whether courage is noble, whether sacrifice is meaningful, whether beauty matters, truth exists, or if freedom is worth defending. They teach us when villains should be resisted, and what even is a “villain” in the first place. Stories help us understand that human beings are flawed but often redeemable.

A healthy civilization needs stories that elevate humanity.

I don’t mean that our civilization needs more propaganda, which I would typically define as deceptive manipulation designed to advance a particular agenda within a closed information ecosystem. What I mean is that if we value our civilization and what made the United States and much of the rest of the modern world as prosperous and free as it is, we need to pass on the lessons from a long chain of causality from Ancient Greece to the present day, and we should be celebrating our cultural history as much as possible. 

That is what our children need.

They need math, physics, biology, and technology, obviously. But they also need economics, civics, history, philosophy, literature, art, music, and moral reasoning. They need to know where their rights came from, why they matter, how fragile they are, and what happened in societies that abandoned them.

Young people need a broad base of knowledge of their own history, not because the West has always been perfect, but because you cannot improve, preserve, criticize, or even intelligently reject a civilization you do not understand.

That is one of the reasons we care so much about this work at Lexandria. 

We do not want students encountering the inheritance of their civilization as a pile of disconnected homework assignments. We want to make the best ideas, stories, debates, documents, and historical moments accessible in one place — and then surround them with classroom activities, lesson plans, discussion questions, teacher guides, bellringers, and resources that help teachers actually bring them to life.

Young people deserve more than shallow content that references only itself.

They deserve stories that connect them to the long chain of human striving, failure, discovery, beauty, sacrifice, and progress that made their world possible.

And if we want the next generation to be harder to manipulate, more capable of self-government, more literate in the deepest sense, and more worthy of the civilization they are inheriting, then we have to stop pretending culture transmits itself.

It doesn’t.

We have to introduce them to it, and that’s just what we aim to do.