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<p>One of my son’s favorite shows! (It’s extremely popular among gay men, for those who didn’t know.)</p>
<p>Curmudgeon, I’ve spent lots of time with my son in the last 19 years “doing nothing” and enjoying ourselves as such. Dolce far niente is a philosophy I’ve long followed, within limits. But did it occur to you that for some kids, going to museums when they’re on vacation just happens to be one of their favorite activities, something they immensely enjoy – and not because they’ve been pressured into it? When my son and I spent 8 days in London together when he was 12, substantial portions of at least 6 of them were spent at the British Museum, the National Gallery, and the Tate Modern. No different from Boston when he was 8 and 14, or Philadelphia when he was 6, or Washington at 5 and 13, or San Francisco at 16, or Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul in 2007 (when he wasn’t visiting the U of C and Macalester!), or Rome last year. None of it my idea. His. It’s been one of my favorite things to do as well, from the time I was a small child and my grandmother took me to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art a dozen times a year. But it isn’t something I’ve ever pushed on him.</p>
<p>It’s just something we love doing together. (Of course, for me all that art just kind of blends together; I find it completely astonishing sometimes that he can remember just about every painting he’s seen in the last 10 years, and where he saw it, and who the artist was. No wonder he’s recently decided to be an art history major! For a while, he thought studying it might ruin his love of art, but he’s come to realize, from a course on the history of photography he’s taking now, how much he loves learning about art theory.) </p>
<p>Really, I have no doubt that there are lots of schools where my son would be happy, academically and otherwise. I don’t think I’m guilty of irrational exceptionalism with respect to the U of C. But I do believe that there aren’t that many schools where he’d find quite as many like-minded kids as there are at Chicago, or where he doesn’t have to worry about the excessive presence of some of the kinds of things (and people) that might interfere with the sort of life he wants to lead at college. </p>
<p>And anyone who thinks that makes either of us “intellectual poseurs” – or who doesn’t recognize the anti-intellectualism that’s been displayed at times in this thread – can go jump in the lake. “Well-rounded” and “well-balanced” are to some extent, and always have been, code words reflecting hostility to kids who are a little “different” from the Jack Armstrong ideal – their origins in college admissions clearly had a good bit to do with the desire to keep out Jews – and are also based on a series of (in my opinion) unproven, and probably unprovable, assumptions about what’s necessary for “success” in life, as well as the meaning of “success” in the first place.</p>
<p>By the way, I don’t consider myself an “intellectual,” and never have. Which is one of the reasons I went to law school instead of graduate school in history. Among other things, I was just too damn lazy to gain the required foreign language proficiency. But my son certainly has the potential to be one, in terms of his talents, his interests, and an enthusiasm for academics that’s much more intense than any I ever had. (At least when it came to actually doing things, instead of just thinking about them!)</p>