Nurtured, a love of learning is a lifelong gift

But it is not simply a newsletter. It is also a Twitter account. And in this format, it is just as engaging. Have you ever wondered why Brazil’s flag is yellow, green and blue? Or why the Argentinian flag is white and blue? The Cultural Tutor will inform you through Twitter threads that incorporate old dynastic empires in Europe (the green of the Brazil flag represents the House of Braganza, the yellow the House of Habsburg), revolutionary upheavals in South America and football. The Cultural Tutor is dedicated to a cosmopolitan view of culture. It writes about every continent, every religion, every tradition of art and poetry. And it is open in terms of what constitutes culture. It is not just opera; it is sport. It is not just ancient philosophy; it is the origins of modern-day flags.

The final email entry of 2022 was released last Friday. It featured a fascinating account of José Rizal, a Filipino national leader, ophthalmologist, sculptor, painter, educator, farmer, historian, playwright, novelist, poet and journalist. And who, by the end of his life, was conversational “in upwards of a dozen languages”.

Another section is about the Abu Simbel temple in Egypt. “If ever a window was needed into the culture of Ancient Egypt,” The Cultural Tutor writes, “Abu Simbel can provide it.” The ruler Ramesses II is represented as a “living god in an architectural and artistic project of almost inconceivable scale, one which naturally demanded vast wealth, plenty of slave labour and scores of skilled artists”.

But this last newsletter started with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 19. The poem ends with these lines: “Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong, / My love shall in my verse ever live young.”

The person behind The Cultural Tutor, who seems to be called Sheehan, then explained why he chose this poem as the first item in the final newsletter of the year: “Shakespeare wished for his love to live forever young in his verse. We might say the same thing of Pelé, who shall live for ever in the glorious images of his legendary life. He was the man who made football the Beautiful Game and a hero of the sort who transcended sport, nation, or any other boundary.”

This message resonated powerfully with me. Pelé tapped into my imagination as a young boy. He was my hero when I was ten; he occupied the same place in my boy’s mind as James Bond and Batman. I remember leafing through a battered copy of his autobiography, watching endless clips of his goals on YouTube, ruminating on his fantastic career: a boy who grew up in pitiless poverty, the descendant of slaves, becoming the best player of the most popular sport in the world.

His career followed the arc of classical myth. The World Cup victory at 17 in 1958; the injury that forced him to sit out most of Brazil’s 1962 defence of their title; the abysmal failure of 1966; the exquisite, record-breaking triumph at the 1970 World Cup.

What learning about Pelé ingrained in me was a curiosity about the world. He wasn’t just a wonderful footballer; he made me interested in South American culture. If someone asked me in my final year of primary school what I wanted to be when I was older, I would have said: to learn Portuguese, to move to Brazil when I was 16 and to become a player for the Brazilian national football team. (My football ambitions were cut short a year later when I failed to get into my secondary school football team.)

The Cultural Tutor is an excellent educational guide because it taps into how we learn things most effectively. When blocks of information transform into gripping narrative, they cease being stale; they become alive. A flag is not just a flag, it is a story about the nation it represents.

Another key ingredient of The Cultural Tutor is that it animates the childlike curiosity in all of us about the world. But this is underpinned by a powerfully optimistic vision of learning as a lifelong process. It doesn’t stop when we finish school. It is a practice we can carry from cradle to grave.

I hope that when I get old I will still ask about people’s first memories; that I will still want to learn about art and culture from every corner of the world; that I will find joy in the satisfaction of knowing.

But my desire for knowledge is vulnerable to misuse today. As someone who uses the internet, I have a lot of bile to wade through. The online world is full of what the writer Gurwinder Bhogal has called “junk info”. Gossip, clickbait, babble. “Like real fast food,” Bhogal writes, “junk info is cheap to produce and pleasing to consume, but also high in additives and low in nutritional value.”

We go to Twitter to waste time. We are distracted by nonsense. It can turn the wonderful gift of curiosity into a stunted muscle. Hungering for insight and wisdom, we become obese on useless tidbits. It can completely desensitise our imagination. Why learn about Byzantine architecture or Renaissance poetry when you can enjoy Greta Thunberg being rude to Andrew Tate?

But the internet is not a complete hellscape. Amid the Babylon of inanity there are still many spots of fine intelligence. The Cultural Tutor is one of them. So is the website Arts & Letters Daily, which curates the best essays and columns every day about philosophy, history and the arts. The Rest is History podcast, praised in these pages last week by James Marriott, is another. I hope to find many more in 2023.