What are some of the important cultural essentials that dancers should be exposed to? (What particular paintings, movies, music, places, or dance?)

Music seems like the obvious choice, but really I think they should be exposed to all of choices and then some.

Dancers of all of the artists seem to be the most self-insulated. I have brainstormed about why that is, but whtever the reason, I don't think it's good for the art of dance as a whole. So much inspiration and understanding can come from other art forms. It can only enrich a dancer's work to be exposed to all kinds of other art.

LMCTech, I presume you refer to American dancers as a whole.

Russians and Europeans who have been through one of the 8-year professional (official) schools are all extremely well-informed about classical literature and poetry, art, and music, including operatic, balletic and orchestral works. They can all read scores and play at least one instrument.

It's really only the US that is lacking bc we don't have the cultural richness that other countries have. JMHO.

Dance students at Purchase College (and other programs of which I know, also) are required to take Dance Stagecraft and do crew work as a practicum. While this is not (usually) enough to qualify them to work backstage professionally, it does teach them that there's more to producing a dance performance than merely choreographing and performing it, and it teaches them (well, some of them) that stagehands are highly skilled professionals, not mindless drones.

Technical theatre students, of course, are almost always required to take dance, music, and acting classes and acting students are usually required to take stagecraft classes; finally, colleges are realising that dancers also need an appreciation of the technical elements.

Colleges are well positioned to require their performing arts students to take some technically classes. Unfortunately this isn't really possible in most professional ballet schools. Unfortunate, because performers without knowledge of what "else" it takes to put on a show, often behave like spoiled brats with stage crew.

I agree that it's not likely to happen, but they could certainly add it into the curriculum if they wanted to do so.

They just have to decide that it's something that's important for dancers to know.