You know, this toy thinks the conversation stemming from this post is really interesting, and it wants to weigh in with its own two cents because in thinking about the argument, itâs started to come to a realization about US culture. So skimming through replies and reblogs, itâs seeing two primary sides here:
Americans saying how horrible their education system is, and talking about how itâs difficult to catch up and learn important things about the world when what little they were taught about the world growing up is mostly misinformation and half-truths
Non-Americans saying that it doesnât matter how bad the US education system is, that if you are ignorant to important things, that is your responsibility to fix, and endlessly harping on about âbut my education system :(((((â is useless
This toy thinks that both sides here are correct, but that a lot of the Americans are pretty severely misunderstanding and misrepresenting the issue that they are talking about. The problem is a lot more fundamental than our education system having a profoundly shitty curriculum (though that is also a problem, to be clear).
Now, full disclosure, this toy lacks the perspective to know if this is true of other countries, but US culture, as a whole, does not particularly value knowledge or learning. Itâs very common for children to ask why they need to learn X subject in school, and the answer they are usually given is some flavor of âgood grades mean you can get into a good college, and getting into a good college means you can get a good job where youâll make lots of money.â
This is the paradigm that Americans are taught to understand learning through. Itâs presented, almost universally, as a chore that you tolerate because you can get money out of it. Knowledge is rarely treated as its own end rather than a means to an end. There are a number of consequences as a result of this:
Children are taught to be incurious about the world around them, because you donât need to understand the world around you to make money. You just need to understand how to read, basic math, and whatever specialist knowledge your job requires.
Children are taught not to seek knowledge out on their own in an informal setting, because learning things outside of a formal school setting doesnât give you a piece of paper you can show to an employer at a job interview.
Important sociopolitical knowledge, or even subjects as basic as the geography of the US itself (this toy literally knows northern Californians who didnât know Oregon was a state until it told them), are downplayed and treated as trivial and unimportant compared to subjects that more directly translate to a wider variety of jobs, like math or athletics.
It is hopefully easy to see why, under this cultural paradigm, Americans have such a tendency to be extremely ignorant towards things like history and global politics, or how other cultures work. And it doesnât help that a lot of American media actively exacerbates this problem. This toyâs pretty sure that the average American believes that Mexico is a collection of small towns in a desert where everything is tinted yellow, for instance, because thatâs how a lot of popular American media depicts the country.
In addition to this, if you are an American youth who decides that you want to learn things about politics and history and the world at large, thereâs a pretty high chance that all of the authority figures around you are staunch conservative historical revisionists who will try to indoctrinate you into their shitty worldview, and will teach you that Every Stereotype Is Right and nearly every other country is ontologically evil and thatâs all you need to know about other cultures. This toy, personally, very nearly fell into that trap when it was in high school.
Thereâs no simple answer to all of this. Like, yeah, obviously more Americans absolutely need to put effort into learning to learn things and then put energy into becoming more aware of global politics and other cultures and the way that the US interacts with the rest of the world. This toy 100% agrees with that.
The problem is that in order to get someone to start researching that kind of stuff, they must first understand that learning things is not a waste of time, that knowledge is not fundamentally useless if it isnât making you money. And if they were indoctrinated into any kind of anti-intellectual or historical revisionist ideology in addition to the general US intellectual laziness, that also needs to be deprogrammed out of them. And after all of that, then they can finally start learning how to learn and properly research things on their own, which is its own skill that needs to be learned, especially if what you intend to research is very nebulous, nuanced subjects with a lot of differing opinions and outright misinformation floating around them, such as politics, history, and entire cultures.
This is why it takes so many Americans until well into their adulthood to actually start properly understanding anything about the world outside of their own country (or, really, outside of their own state), if they ever do in the first place. Itâs a really shitty situation, and one of the biggest sources of rot at the core of American culture imo.
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