The goal was to get French kids to learn about art, music, plays, and more in order to become more cultured. Instead, teens blew their money on manga. Do you consider this a waste of tax-payer money?
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The goal was to get French kids to learn about art, music, plays, and more in order to become more cultured. Instead, teens blew their money on manga. Do you consider this a waste of tax-payer money? - Results (80 votes)
When the French government launched a smartphone app that gives 300 euros to every 18-year-old in the country for cultural purchases like books and music, or exhibition and performance tickets, most young peoples impulse wasnt to buy Prousts greatest works or to line up and see Molire.
Instead, Frances teenagers flocked to manga.
Nol Corbin, a Culture Ministry official who oversees the project, said the pass gave Frances newly minted adults a way of looking up nearby cultural offerings the app has a geolocation feature and encouraged them to indulge their cultural passions.
But it also uses incentives to push teenagers toward new, more challenging art forms, he said, a type of curation to bring young people to discover the realms of possibility of cultural life.
Those include recommendation lists curated by Culture Pass staff members and by popular artists and celebrities, as well as access to V.I.P. events, like a live-streamed concert at the Soulages Museum in southern France and a behind-the-scenes look at the Avignon theater festival.
In a speech to launch the Culture Pass in May, President Emmanuel Macron, who had made the initiative one of his campaign promises, said that France would mark a formidable victory when young people stop saying, This work of literature, this movie is not for me.
Yet critics argue that letting 825,000 teenagers loose with free cash and expecting them to be nudged away from the nearest multiplex and into an art-house movie theater is a nave waste of taxpayer money.
