im american and i knew that like in kindergarten so i think some of you are just stupid sorry
"US curriculums don't talk about-" ok? And? Are you guys not absorbing literally any information from the outside world? Tv, movies, books, people talking around you? Hello????
I'm sorry do people need to be taught that other countries have metropolitan cities in school or is that information you can kinda infer from like. existing in real life
Absurd that people will just say shit like this with their whole chest. If I had somehow gotten through life to age 21 believing that my country had cities but my silly primitive sepia-toned neighbours didn't then when contrary information came up I'd keep my mouth shut and head right to wikipedia. I'd take that misconception to the fucking grave.
For USAmericans who care to listen; the issue here is not that you were never taught or exposed to facts about the world but rather that ignorance is used as a shield for criticism. This is considered a dick move as you're basically saying you know you're ignorant, you're saying you don't want to learn.
If you're older than fifteen and not currently trapped in or recently escaped from a very overbearing cult then "I wasn't taught that at school" isn't an excuse for beliefs that reveal that you fundamentally don't think of other places as real or important. "It wouldn't occur to me to put 'USA' on my address for international shipping because I just expect everyone in other countries to know where my state is even though I don't know theirs" "I just assumed that other countries on my continent wouldn't have cities for some reason" "naturally I just assume that having states is a US thing and other countries either don't have them or they don't mean anything, other places don't have regional differences like we do, we're so varied and everywhere else is a Country Of Hats" THIS IS A YOU PROBLEM. We all have shitty education systems, yours isn't special. We all have racist governments and nationalist propoganda machines, yours isn't special. Your American exceptionalism isn't suddenly cute and humble if you try to make it about your country being extra bad instead of extra good. You just learned you made a stupid assumption due to inherent racist or nationalist or whatever beliefs? Now you have better information. Maybe think QUIETLY TO YOURSELF about what other dumb assumptions you have because of that and spend some time on wikipedia or watching foreign movies or something instead of crying to the internet that it's your fourth grade teacher's fault for not making you memorise a list of foreign cities.
We all believe dumb shit and don't know anything. You think I know anything about your states? I don't. When people from non-English-speaking countries started buying my books online I couldn't understand the address formats to post them; I had to learn. I don't automatically know which countries in the world are larger than mine, I look up the info if I need it. Sometimes I say make a bad assumption and dumb shit and people are like "Derin what you said is wrong actually" and tell me otherwise and then I learn that. This is not an issue of having information. Everyone can be wrong about stuff, but your "uphill in the snow both ways" ranting about how nobody should expect better from you because Your Uniquely Bad Culture And Schooling is at fault for every problem is getting old.
Y'all don't seem to understand that, for a lot of Americans, the first time they experience truly global thinking is University. That's why Universities are so dangerous to certain political factions. It's not rocket science, but education is IMPORTANT and not all educations are created the same. I would encourage you to try to understand that an alarming % of the USA is illiterate or has a very low level of education. That's not necessarily their fault. Be kind. Understand that the world SUCKS and some people need a little help seeing that the world is this huge, complicated, interconnected machine that runs BETTER with kindness.
What Americans leaving comments like this think they sound like:
What they actually sound like:
It is true that, since this is such a widespread phenomenon among USAmericans, there has to be some non-individual factor that causes it. But that isn’t the education system not teaching that other countries have real people in them, it’s the degree to which American exceptionalism is ingrained in US culture— and I suspect that “progressive” USAmericans often can’t recognize that this isn’t just an education system problem because they don’t want to admit that they could have actual deeply rooted biases, and would rather just imagine that this isn’t all a simple educational blind spot. If that’s all it was, then you would just look it up and move on.
You're not wrong but think more than that the answer is a little bit simpler: Americans, as citizens of the world's foremost cultural and economic hegemon, have no material incentive to learn about the rest of the world. They simply don't *need* to. Everywhere else in the world you kinda need to have a baseline level of knowledge about the USA and other first-world countries, but in the USA you don't need to have a baseline level of knowledge about anywhere else in the world, so most people never learn it.
Which honestly by itself would be fine with me, can't blame them for responding to the material incentives present in their society.
But what I *can* and *do* blame them for on a cultural level is that, when confronted with this fact, the vast majority of americans construct this weird narrative wherein lacking that baseline level of knowledge about the world is a sign of them being uniquely disadvantaged (worse educated, more propagandized, more overworked and underpaid, more unable to travel, more affected my a culture that discourages learning and intellectual curiosity) compared to the rest of the world, instead of facing the reality that it's a sign of them being uniquely privileged in the sense that they can get through their entire life without *needing* to know any of this stuff.
Okay I am going to be mean for a second.
"But you see! America is so illiterate! We cannot help ourselves, we are just illiterate, it's a huge issue! You would never understand!"
Oh, cry me a fucking river
Straight for Wikipedia: World map of countries shaded according to the literacy rate for all people aged 15 and over.
Please note where the US is on the list.
And now look at the rest of the world, where people somehow don't react to being corrected online by claiming that the reason they never assumed other countries have cities is because they have such huge rates of illiteracy that the rest of the world could never understand their struggle.
My grandma has only four years of primary school and SOMEHOW she knows other countries have cities. It's nearly as if formal education is not the only possible source of information.
If nothing else I'd heard of how big and crowded Mexico City is, and Tijuana as a place just over the border from San Diego
