Letters - Generations apart

From Catherine Rose, arts manager, facilitator and writer
I found Andrew Curry?s article (AP issue 101, July 4) very inspiring as a catalyst for further thought. I had a few quibbles, of course ? for instance, nothing on the Internet is free to use while we have to pay for hardware and electricity. However, my main reaction is this: the arts, crafts and sport are particularly important to creating ?healthy social networks and engagement with the public world? because of the access they give us to people of different ages. One of the crucial influences in my life, since I was around 11 years old, has been that through music I have worked and socialised alongside people both much younger and much older than myself. Trends in marketing over the past few decades, and trends in government policy which are aimed specifically at young people, have emphasised barriers not only between generations, but between people only a few years older or younger. This has followed a natural tendency in human nature (especially that of the adolescent to separate him- or herself from the worlds of both the child and the adult), but has taken it too far ? perverted it, in fact. We should resist the pressure to be divided and categorised, by age or anything else. The arts is a major area where people of all ages can forge relationships which are as important for the health of society, and of intellectual discourse, as they are for the health of the individual.