*DED*

[fightingthecage]

The World according to America.

I. Am. So. Ded.

Standard Disclaimer: I'm pretty damn sure none of the Americans on my flist think this way. If you do, please make yourselves known so I can stare in horror at you.

If anyone wants to know where I found that, it was in a comment replying to this post in overheardnyc

Teen girl #1: Okay. Maybe I'm, like, retarded for not knowing this,
but...did you guys know that other countries have national anthems, too?
Teen girl #2: Duh! It's the same song, in different languages!

--Bay Ridge


Overheard by: Lysa

Overall just - BWHAHAHAHAHAHA!

ETA: Another one! HEE!

Comments

[romanticapathy.livejournal.com]

Word.

I think it's to do with a mixture of a useless educational system and a big fat dose of patriotism arrogance. Not only that, our culture is vastly moronic and completely shallow.

[halfwest.livejournal.com]

Agreed!

I never had a geography course. Ever. I never learned any history outside the US until 9th grade. Granted, this has a LITTLE to do with odd school-switching, going from a school where certain areas of ancient history were taught later to one where it was taught earlier, therefor missing it all together. But also we never studied any history past WWI.

We have culture?

As far as I can tell, the extent of American culture consists of hotdogs and adding "-izzle" to random words.

[fightingthecage.livejournal.com]

I also find it amazing that you were never taught history beyond WWI. Because...um, America eventually got into WWII, y'know? And...the Wall Street Crash? The Depression? Vietnam? They were all pretty huge events in the States. The first two were hammered into me in history class, because of the worldwide repercussions it had on the world economically - and it was also a large part of the build up to WWII. And they don't teach it in American schools? 0_0!

[fightingthecage.livejournal.com]

But does that mean that y'all study it for only two years? I mean, we study specific parts of history the last two years in high school, for our GCSE's - and that's pretty much all 20th Century history. Both the World Wars, the economic aspects that contributed to WWII (globally, not just British), the League of Nations, the Cold War - don't touch Vietnam, because it didn't impact Britain but anything that did from other countries got dug into in-depth.

Even before that though, we got a general look at world history in the first three years of high school - and in primary school, we had years of English medieval history (I think they knew that the blood and gore of the Battle of Hastings would be fascinating to 7-8-9 year olds :D). So...yeah, it's kind of hard to see that history isn't really taught as much in America - and also understandable I guess, seeing as the stuff we had to learn about all happened before America was discovered by the Europeans.

I don't want to make it sound like we have a great education system because we really don't. To take history, I had to give up Geography (fine with me, I hated it) and English and Maths and the Sciences are far more important to schools. Languages too. But Humanities (name used for both history and geography before you choose one specific subject to study for exams) certainly don't get screwed as much as the other Arts. Music and drama are almost an afterthought now, as is formalized sports lessons (by that I mean that any kid can play sports in lunchtime/after school activities but if kids don't want to bother in the actual lesson they're not pushed all that much). Maybe it's because the way history is taught makes it relevant to what's going on now, and with our neighbours etc. Perhaps America doesn't have that dimension, having peaceful neighbours.

Hmmmm. Interesting.