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Being cultured means exploring the unknown.

The shrinking world and waves of migrants continually re-educate America, reinventing its culture and its sense of what it means to be a refined person. The white Anglo-Saxon Protestant’s cultural bedrock of Shakespeare and the Bible has eroded: grad students today are as likely to be writing on the 12^th-century Sufi saints or Mario Vargas Llosa novels as they are on the Western canon. Postmodernity – that trendy pseudo-philosophy that questioned hidden prejudices and preconceptions underpinning knowledge – managed, for a time, to shrink the space between high and low culture. During its vogue in the 1980s, Yale literature students were taught to “read” Ralph Lauren perfume ads with the same solemnity they applied to the Iliad.

Though the po-mo rage has faded, scholars are still waging fierce debates over whether students are vessels to be filled with facts or souls to be stretched with perceptions. For the IT generation, many of whom can Web-surf as soon as they can read, the possibilities of cyberspace dazzle more than the slow-burn pleasures of a sonnet. Many teachers now emphasize attitudes like risk taking and compassion over knowledge. The stress is often made on learning how to learn.

Given our fast-changing, globalized and info-saturated world, what will the cultured person the future look like? In the past, being educated meant knowing lots about the past. In the 21^st century, it will increasingly mean looking to the future. We live in an age when professionals are increasingly specialized. The truly educated person – whether a Milton scholar, a Web-solutions designer or a brain surgeon – will be someone who can communicate with those outside their profession. A shrunken world latticed with interconnections will need translators – across borders, disciplines and cultures. All the parts of the world are interacting in such complex ways that the cultured person will be someone open to other cultures. They’ll have to be able to transcend their own culture, language and outlook.

In the 1920s an American high-school senior could parse Virgil. A recent poll found that only one in seven Americans between 18 and 14 could find Iraq on a map. “A lot of American education focuses on making kids feel comfortable,” observes sociologist Richard Sennett. “It interprets the everyday. That’s not a good recipe for broadening your horizons.”

Perhaps not, but it may be the danger of a democratic age. More than a century ago, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that democracies bred self-obsession: “In democratic communities,” he wrote, “each citizen is habitually engaged in the contemplation of a very puny object: namely himself.” The era of the Blogger, the personal Web site and the call-in cable show provides a marketplace of opportunities to listen to oneself or the like-minded. The trick, for coming generations, will be to stop contemplating the self, and to spend more time breathing unknown air.