The English classic of the Enlightenment is probably Gibbon's Decline and Fall.  With due respect to the broad mindedness and tolerance Enlightenment values can bring, Gibbon manages to be both sexist, racist and homophobic* in his admiration for Manly Roman Virtue against decadent Christianity which gave value to women and slaves.

* My fave quote from Gibbon is his footnote to his disapproval of Hadrian's unmanly love for Antinous.  "Yet we may remark that of the first fourteen emperors, Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct."

I think you are touching on some important stuff, Phil, but you are sploshing about generalizations like they are going out of fashion. There are all sorts of nuances in cultures and political sympathies.

Couldn't it equally be taken to indicate that there's a problem of social prestige which leads him to feel he needs to prove himself as a 'classical' composer?

I'm not trying to be flippant here, and I'm aware of the dangers of relativism attendant on the kind of position I'm taking. I don't believe a Beatles song is as great an achievement of the human mind as a Beethoven symphony, but I do believe that there are different kinds of competence, and that competence in understanding or indeed imitating a Beatles song is better than incompetence at understanding or imitating a Beethoven symphony.

To answer the question of the thread title more directly, I'd say that 'forcing' children to learn to read Western classical music notation is no more likely to turn them into musicians than the current system of foreign language teaching in schools succeeds in turning students into adults who are competent at communicating in a foreign language. I don't believe the teaching of music notation should be abolished - mainly because I don't believe the lack of any skill is better than the possession of it - but I do believe that encouraging music notation as a supposed means of access to 'the great classical repertoire' is as likely to alienate students from that repertoire as it is to involve them in it, and I do strongly believe that more imaginative consideration needs to be given to the question of what skills are taught, what skills are privileged, and how much room is given for students to learn a different set of skills if for any reason that suits them better (which is emphatically not the same as saying that it's fine to give them spurious qualifications which require them to learn no skills at all).

With regards to the lamenting of the loss of cultural knowledge of youth today, I feel that it might be worth pointing out that the difference might as well be one of difference, as much as one of the relative size of knowledge.  Kids who've been brought up on Warner Brothers cartoons aren't going to know too much about classical mythology, but they will come into adulthood, their minds saturated with a different kind of mythology.  I'm inclined to think that my phase of obsession with dinosaurs in my younger years would have been, were I born fifty or so years ago, a mythological phase instead.  The traditional body of cultural 'context' is falling apart a little in some ways (was it ever stable in the first place?), but more attention I think must be paid to what students know and how to work with that as opposed to what they do not know that other people who are charged with teaching them think that they should already know.

(I do agree with much of what has been said before on this thread, but mainly wish to counter some of the sentiment that's been expressed)

That's a rather vocational approach to the matter, surely? 

All very true, Ron. Technology really does change society, more than religion and politics do. What's happening in Eastern Europe might not interest them, but I can say the same about most of the people who actually live there. I recently found out that in Croatia, corruption and war crimes are almost absent from the media because people only want to know things about popstars. The most important thing to remember here is that in Croatia, the media are largely being controlled by Western media companies.

Here's something about the situation in Russia:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/world/europe/27tabloids.html?pagewanted=print

“If we cover high culture, people will run away. Leo Tolstoy, we won’t come close to.”

This is also interesting (warning: some pictures may be disturbing):

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/world/middleeast/26censor.html?th&emc=th

It's all so depressing...

I believe Allan Bloom said the same thing in The Closing of the American Mind.

I don't know if it's true, but commercial pop culture is everywhere nowadays.

Well, broadcasting technology changed quite significantly around 20 years ago with the advent of cable and satellite. This enabled a new level of international broadcasting, or rather a newly globalised broadcasting, which the likes of Murdoch of course exploited to the maximum. And the Reithian ideals behind national terrestrial non-commercial broadcasting had to compete with this vast new range of channels. No longer can the BBC simply broadcast what they think is best (or, a cynic might say, what they think is 'good for people' - and there is some of that in the Reithian ethos) safe in the knowledge that people are still likely to watch it - nowadays they are much more likely to flick through another 50 channels, most of which aim much more to give the type of self-gratification that many viewers want. Institutions like the BBC have to compete with this.

But technology is not separate from politics, almost ever, and technological development is frequently steered by wider forces (not least the defence industry).