The things money can’t buy, and the things nobody thinks to teach us.

I took my mentee to an exhibition on Montaigne, one of the giants of French literature, in a public library.

She’d never set foot in a library before.

The barrier wasn’t money. She simply felt out of place, and that feeling had kept her out of every room like it.

The World Bank has a number for the poor. It has none for the person who dies at eighty without ever learning to swim.

They owned a house and drove a car. They checked the newest phone every day, but they never learned a second language. Never touched an instrument. Never read a page written outside their own culture.

They never once stood somewhere their customs weren’t the norm and felt their certainties shake.

This is perhaps the deepest form of poverty, because money can’t cure it.

While some people are exploited out of their time and never get the opportunity to explore, others have both the money and the hours.

What they lack is the appetite to venture beyond the familiar, and the courage to do something with the freedom they already possess.

I know an elderly couple who’ve spent decades holidaying at the same campsite. Every summer, they rent the same little place, unpack their bags and move their everyday lives a few hundred kilometers south.

Contentment or intellectual poverty?

Two causes that money explains

Let’s start with the two causes everybody accepts. Hours and money. They’re real.

Picture a child whose parents work two jobs to cover rent and food.

They leave early. They come back late. Their days belong to survival.

When exactly are they supposed to teach that child to swim? Take them to a museum? Read to them? Learn a language alongside them?

They may love that child more than anything, but love doesn’t create hours.

The data backs it up.

In Eurostat’s 2022 culture statistics, people in the highest income quintile took part in cultural activities at least twice as often as people in the lowest quintile across the EU. In Bulgaria, the gap reached 6.5 times!

Participation also fell between 2015 and 2022 in every EU country except Spain. France, for instance, recorded one of the sharpest drops.

Material poverty often creates cultural poverty, but material poverty doesn’t fully explain it.

A museum can be free and still closed to someone who’s learned that it isn’t meant for them.

A society that feeds, houses and schools every child but leaves their cultural development to whatever time and money their parents happen to have doesn’t offer equal opportunity.

It reproduces inequality through a quieter channel.

Causes money can’t explain

Take the old couple again. They’re financially comfortable. They have time to explore, and yet they choose the same place every single year.

Money isn’t the barrier. Time isn’t either. It’s fear dressed up as preference.

The familiar is safe.

The unfamiliar makes you a beginner. A foreigner. Someone who might be wrong in front of strangers.

An adult who hasn’t been a beginner in forty years will do almost anything to avoid it.

Fear isn’t the only factor though. Comfort has the same effect.

A stable job, a familiar street and a weekend routine give you every reason to stay and none to leave.

Comfort doesn’t feel like a cage. It feels like a life.

Some people stay out because they were made to feel they don’t belong.

A theater. A concert hall. A gallery. The doors are open and the message is still clear. Not for you.

Class does that. Race and accent do it too.

The people who feel it rarely label it as exclusion. They say it’s just not their thing.

Then there’s the cause people hate to name.

Some people simply aren’t interested. Not in history. Not in other countries. Not in how anything works.

I’ve met many of them. Their interests end at the basics.

But a mind that stops asking stops stretching.

After enough years, such behavior passes for low intelligence, when it all started as a bad habit.

And if that wasn’t enough, now there’s a machine built to keep you exactly where you are.

Platforms feed you more of what you already like and call it personalization.

Nobody has to forbid you from exploring. They only have to make staying put effortless and rewarding.

What gets passed down

My father left for work at eight in the morning. Sometimes earlier. He came back at seven in the evening. Sometimes later.

He always made sure we ate together. And talked.

My parents spoke to us like we were mature enough to understand what they were trying to convey. My grandmother did the same thing, and boy did she have stories.

My father was gone eleven hours a day. He still showed up at the table.

Bourdieu had a name for what my father handed us. Cultural capital.

The books. The instruments. The dinner table conversations about history. The vacations abroad when we could afford them. The ease of talking about all of it.

A child raised in that environment learns a second language at five and an instrument at seven.

A child raised without it starts later and spends years catching up on what the first child absorbed for free.

Neither is smarter. Neither works harder.

What looks like personal achievement at thirty is often an investment someone else made at five.

Nothing replaces that start but you can always teach yourself. It’s harder, but definitely not impossible or out of reach.

I realize some households have no cultural life to hand down at all. Some children aren’t shut out of culture, they’ve simply never met it.

Bad parenting does the rest. Not cruelty. Neglect of the mind.

A parent who never reads to their child, never answers the questions and never takes them anywhere raises a copy of themselves.

The copy grows up and does the same to the next child.

This poverty perpetuates itself across generations. Nobody has to decide it should.

Curiosity is a habit before it’s a trait.

A child whose questions get answered learns to ask more. A child whose questions get waved off learns to stop.

By sixty, nobody can tell the difference between a preference and a wound.

School can finish what the home started.

A system that rewards the right answer over the good question teaches children that curiosity is a detour.

They learn to chase grades. They stop chasing questions.

It’s still a choice. An adult makes it, with a childhood behind it.

That’s why the cure can’t be a lecture to grown people. It has to start with children.

A small world is not harmless

I pity people who live and die inside small worlds, and I won’t dress that up.

They inherit a language, a religion, a neighborhood and a set of beliefs. They repeat them for life among people who think the same way.

The bubble feels safe. So anything outside it feels like an attack.

That’s fertile ground for racism and xenophobia.

It’s easy to hate a people you’ve never sat down with, never read and whose history you’ve never learned.

It’s also fertile ground for manipulation.

Someone who’s never compared their own culture’s story with anybody else’s will believe whoever tells it with enough confidence.

Demagogues have always depended on closed worlds.

Exposure doesn’t cure prejudice automatically. Educated people can be racist and xenophobic too, while many people with little schooling are generous and open.

But exposure changes the odds.

Learning the history of another civilization makes it harder to reduce its people to a stereotype.

Reading literature from another continent puts you inside lives you’d otherwise judge from the outside.

A second language gives you thoughts that don’t survive translation.

The histories, struggles and achievements of the Global South stop being a blank.

The goal isn’t to abandon your culture. It’s to stop being its prisoner.

Belonging somewhere is different from being unable to imagine anywhere else.

Education shouldn’t just prepare people to fit the society they were born into. It should equip them to question that society, compare it with others and improve it.

The same goes for the living world.

If you can’t identify a tree, a bird or the crop growing at the edge of your town, you’re missing most of the place you live in. The destruction of that world won’t phase you, because you’ve no attachement to it.

Making things for no reason

Drawing. Painting. Pottery. Woodworking. Sewing.

An instrument. A garden. A camera.

Most adults have never seriously tried anything outside of their comfort zone.

We watch films instead of making them. We listen to music instead of learning it. We scroll through other people’s photographs instead of taking our own.

Entertainment isn’t the enemy. A life made only of consumption is.

Making things teaches what no qualification does.

Drawing teaches you to observe. An instrument teaches you to listen and to practice badly before you practice well. Wood teaches you that measurements are unforgiving. A garden teaches you that you don’t set the schedule.

And the object you finish exists only because you decided it should. Even if it’s clumsy and useless to everybody else.

Now everything creative gets pushed toward a market.

You draw, so you should sell prints. You photograph, so you should build an audience. You cook, so you should open a business.

We stopped talking about writers, painters and people who make things. We started talking about content creators.

And content exists to perform. Reach. Engagement. Revenue.

A hobby that can’t be monetized starts to look like wasted time.

It’s the opposite.

Marx described labor under capitalism as human activity organized around ends that belong to someone else. The worker ends up alienated from their own creative capacity.

That logic now runs through our leisure. We track our workouts. We optimize our sleep. We turn rest into another line on a self-improvement list.

If working hours are organized around productivity, must free hours be organized around it too?

A painting that never leaves your bedroom is a legitimate use of an afternoon. So is a poem nobody reads.

I’m not against artists who earn a living from their work.

The problem starts when money becomes the only accepted reason to make anything.

Télémaque

This isn’t just idealism.

I know a model that works because I’m inside it.

Since October 2023, I’ve been a volunteer mentor with Télémaque. It’s an association that gives students from modest families access to cultural, artistic and other experiences they would never otherwise have.

Télémaque contacted me on LinkedIn after reading my professional background. Two interviews at their headquarters followed.

They cared less about my CV than about my upbringing, my interests and everything I had learned outside work. They wanted to know who I was beyond my job title.

Mentees are selected as carefully as mentors.

Télémaque looks for students from families who can cover the essentials but not music lessons, workshops or sport. And who want to succeed.

It selects on motivation. It doesn’t chase perfect grades and it doesn’t excuse disengagement.

The point is to back students who are willing to do the work.

The association puts mentor, student and family in contact and lets them decide how to organize their time together.

Télémaque contributes financially to activities. The mentor does nearly everything else. Finding opportunities. Planning sessions. Teaching skills. Accompanying the student there.

That’s the difference from a voucher.

A voucher assumes the child already knows what to want. A mentor shows them what exists.

That exhibition was only the beginning.

Since then, the conversations have gone places no program could have scheduled.

My mentee has become interested in environmentalism and veganism, subjects she had never considered because they only reach you when someone around you raises them.

We talk about work and languages. She wants to practice, so we often switch to English or Spanish. We talk about politics too.

None of this came from a syllabus.

It came from an adult who kept showing up and treated her curiosity as worth feeding.

A mentor is another adult with a different background and a different relationship to the world.

The student gets more than an activity. They get proximity to another world.

The mentor learns too. Transmission runs both ways.

Télémaque can’t reach everyone. A volunteer program that selects its students will always leave some out.

That’s an argument for public funding and for building the model into public institutions. Not an argument against it.

And it shouldn’t be reserved for the poor.

Financial comfort doesn’t necessarily translate into a rich upbringing. I’ve seen this firsthand through my English lessons, where most of my students come from middle-class families. Their parents can afford holidays, the latest devices and private education, yet their children’s free time is almost entirely consumed by video games and streaming platforms. Material comfort is there, but that doesn’t automatically mean intellectual stimulation, curiosity or meaningful experiences.

Money and cultural enrichment are different things.

Light it early

I’m not asking for a nation of polyglots and pianists.

I’m asking that nobody has the limits of their life set by their parents’ rent.

Curiosity doesn’t appear independently of opportunity. You can’t demand it from people you’ve deprived of the conditions to grow it.

Real freedom isn’t having enough money to buy more things.

It’s having enough time and autonomy to experience more of life.

To learn without needing a qualification. To make something beautiful without selling it. To travel without documenting it.

To spend an afternoon doing nothing productive and feel no guilt.

A bigger paycheck doesn’t fix this poverty. Neither does free time.

Curiosity does, and somebody has to light it early.

My mentee believed museums weren’t for her until one afternoon proved otherwise.

Most people never get that afternoon.

Teekay