part of pop culture. The trouble with pop culture is that its values are constantly shifting. Something that was so fashionable as to be almost compulsory a few years ago is considered ridiculous now.
Chess is an intellectual game that builds reasoning and planning skills. Music, theater, dance, and visual art take kids outside themselves and foster their emotional intelligence. Forensics, especially debate, builds self-confidence and develops the "bullshit detector." Home ec. and shop, two courses that are often cut when budgets are tight, teach practical skills that let us avoid mass corporate consumerism to a greater degree than if we didn't have those skills. If you can cook from scratch, sew and repair your own clothes, or make wooden and metal objects, that's a kind of freedom.
Unlike team sports, which are sacred cows in this country, all of these can be life-long activities. My stepfather, a professional musician, played the piano when he was well into Alzheimer's. A friend of our family who lived to be 103 painted lovely watercolors. The community theater in a town where I used to live had a frequent participant in his 80s who tried to appear in every production, even if it was just in a crowd scene. I can even think of professionals in these fields who literally worked till shortly before their deaths.
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