Education, American Style.

Americans. We have a global reputation as being dumb, arrogant, and fat. I won't deny it, as I am constantly baffled by my own ignorance.

Our national nutritionist.

Baffled, yet I graduated in the top 5% of my high school class with a 3.96 GPA. I was on the list for valedictorian. I then completed two bachelor's degrees. I was awarded 'Outstanding Something or Other' by my college department (the kind of crap that gets you a special mention in the graduation program, and an $8 plaque which you threw away out of disgust with your life at age 28).

I consider myself highly literate and fairly good at research (though a Ph.D. dissertation might shame my grammar skills). I am functional in 3 foreign languages. I have specialized art education. My world geography skills are well above average. I keep up on science and tech news. I will admit that I blow at math. If I had to guess at my IQ, I would place it in the 130's.

I am what you get if you are looking for a properly educated American.

Here are some more facts:

1. In 6th grade we memorized all the countries of the world... except those on the entire continent of Africa. The reasons? "They aren't that important." and "They are all(!) at war right now."

2. I did not know Russia took part in WWII until I was 26. That's right. I'm sure you Europeans just choked on your croissants. No, seriously. I have a similarly educated friend who asked if socialists were the same as Nazis. I also have a friend convinced that The Philippines are occupied by Japan, and another that thought that Ireland was France on a map.

3. I was never required to take a World History class, neither in middle school, high school, nor college. World History was full, I was busy, and a class on tornados filled the same social science requirement. We spent the whole class watching videos of tornados wrecking shit.

Your world history textbook won't save your sorry ass when this beast rips through your house.

4. Interest calculation (you know...that thing that fucks you on your credit card and mortgage?). Well, I was in a senior level arts finance class my last quarter of college. This was no 'Intro 101' course! The catalog number was like, 'Finance for Entertainment 400000060001', with 12 prerequisites. Our homework quality was so, so consistently bad that we collectively made the elderly guest professor cry. He could not believe that 23 year olds were so godawful fucking bad at financial math. They had to grade the entire class on a curve, where the highest grade was a D. The dean of the department let us write essays instead of doing our compound interest calculations. It was such a fiasco they removed it from the course catalog. Oh, yeah... at that point in my life I was already 5 years and $14,000 into default on credit cards I got from tables in the campus quad.

Uh-oh. They finally figured out that 35% compound interest over 30 years is a fucking scam, and told the rest of them.

5. I spent several (required!) semesters, if not years, of college taking duplicate classes that I had already taken in high school. College algebra? Same as high school algebra. 12 credits of college Spanish? Worse than high school Spanish (the classroom looked like a kindergarten, had piñatas, and we watched Disney movies). I took Biological Anthropology twice, with the same text book, for different credit requirements. Literature classes where I re-read books I'd read in middle school, then watched movies. I've taken the same psychology class 3 times.

6. Nutrition? You jest!

7. My high school US History class was taught by the football coach. On a late road trip back from a concert, I sarcastically wrote an essay titled, "Why Bono is the Most Important Person in American History," expecting to get a D for effort. I got an A+. We were also supposed to wear costumes for our presentation. That's right. Costumes. I wore a U2 t-shirt, and claimed I was Bono. Your kids in Europe are busy learning engineering math and perfect English, and we're prancing around in Halloween costumes.

8. I shit you not, I clearly remember watching both Die Hard and Terminator II in a high-school lab science class.

Photosynthesis, American style!

9. And finally, I had a college business professor posit, "If too many people die from AIDS in Africa, could all the groundwater in Africa be permanently contaminated with AIDS? We just can't know these things."

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Is it any wonder the US is full of fucking idiots? You can sink $40,000 into your education, and you still end up a fucking idiot! I've engaged in decades of independent research, PBS viewing, world travel, conversations with educated friends, foreign newspapers, and library books in an attempt to erase the incompetence of our higher education system.

I think it's by design. The government doesn't want us to know the native culture or history of the next country we bomb. They don't want us to know anything about communist countries other than, "It's really hard to get Levi's there!" I point toward the disastrous housing crash, and ask if it isn't by design that no one here can figure out the life-ruining math on interest rates.

Oh, yeah. The reason for this tangent. This happened.
Kentucky Cuts Education Funding, Builds Bible Theme Park