Guess it's all Bad Education

8/8/07

From my Sociology journal:

We are no longer in the familiarity of Denver. We spent the last two and a half days in Gallup, New Mexico, and are currently in transit between there and Tucson, Arizona.
Even though the time spent in Gallup was exceptionally brief, it was still a very memorable experience. I stayed with a host family of immigrants from India along with three of my cast mates and our cast director. My host parents were particularly generous (not to mention phenomenal cooks), and it was great to learn about their culture. They also had two pet cats, which was very delightful for me since it reminded me of my cat back home.
While at our host family's house, I also had some very rewarding conversations with my roommates, though some of these conversations led to a bit of embarrassment on my part. One of these was when my roommates from China and the Netherlands revealed that they both knew George W. Bush's middle name, whereas neither of my American roommates nor myself knew this little snippet of information.
The other embarrassing conversation was very similar - this occurred when my Dutch and Chinese roommates once again displayed their outstanding intelligence by playing this game where one would name a country and the other would name its capitol. They were correct for nearly all of them, but Justen (from Texas) and I knew close to zero. The really embarrassing part was when they moved to our state capitols, and they knew more of those than we Americans did. It was only slightly reassuring when they both admitted that they hadn't gained all of their geographical knowledge from school, but had studied maps a lot on their free time. Either way, I was quite ashamed of my ignorance (especially since my dad teaches geography).
Last night, however, we stayed up 'til two in the morning having an existential conversation about religion, infinity, the possibility of an afterlife, and other such things. I somewhat redeemed my dignity since this was much more familiar territory for me, but nevertheless I made a vow to myself to improve my geography (which will undoubtedly start to happen on the this trip).

My education was once again put in question today during a really good conversation that I had with my "bus date" from Germany. We were discussing the differences between the German and American education systems. It turns out that she had learned about many subjects during high school that weren't even offered to me until college, such as philosophy, world religions, and ethics. She had also received a much more efficient high school education in regards to such subjects as the natural sciences as well as foreign language (which was obvious, since it's the USA we're talking about). I was a little embarrassed, but I was even more outraged that I had been deprived of such knowledge.
Why is it that our society deems it unnecessary to teach its youth about foreign cultures, languages, and religions? More and more I am becoming rather disgusted by my country's ethnocentrism. I mean, many people don't even go to college, and therefore remain in ignorance about important subjects that aren't even introduced until the college level. I think it would be a great idea for high schoolers to take a class in world religions - maybe then there would be less discrimination and misunderstanding of others' cultures. I mean, there are so many Americans who are blatantly prejudiced against Muslims these days, but I can guarantee that the majority of those people don't have a CLUE about Islam or its teachings. In fact, it is somewhat sadly humorous that many of the Christians who are prejudiced against Muslims are COMPLETELY oblivious to the fact that both Christianity and Islam (as well as Judaism) in fact share the same roots!!
It's just not fair that I had to go out of my way to learn about some of these important, relevant subjects if I didn't want to wait until college to find out about them. It is especially unfair when you consider the fact that the system could have easily provided me the opportunity to do so; similar to Germany and many of the other developed nations in the world.
Maybe I just had an incompetent high school, coming from rural Wyoming and all (I never even had the opportunity to study sociology until I cam to USD), but unfortunately, I have a feeling that this is probably the case for most schools throughout the nation. But then, maybe I should stop bitching and actually strive to make a change.