Yea social sciences, geography, history, and the world in general are all incredibly important. It doesn't matter how they teach it in school, you need to know that stuff very well anyways. I have seen so many examples where Americans are an embarassment to our whole country because they will go to another country, or talk to someone of another culture and know absoulutely nothing about that person or where they are coming from. And it's not just young people, there are plenty of adults out there who are completely ignorant of the world around them (Our own president for example). Much of the rest of the world focuses so hard on learning about America and the world even though they live in horrid conditions and are unimaginably poor with no chance of advancing, yet we with all the oppurtunity in the world, do nothing.
Here is an example of what I am talking about. Last fall I was in Tibet, so here we are in this small village, walking around looking at what the street vendors are selling, when this one guy, not more than 20 years old starts talking to us in very good english. We were real suprised obviously since not many people in this rural Tibetan village at 14,500 ft. spoke englsih. So he asks us where we are from and we say the U.S and he says what state, and we are thinking, yea right like this guy is gonna know anything about U.S states, so we go ahead and say Colorado, and he says well what city, Denver, Grand Junction, Glenwood Springs or Pueblo. Now we are shocked, I mean here is a young guy selling hand made rugs on a street in a village outside Lhasa, and he has just named 4 cities in the state of Colorado 8,000 miles away. Needless to say the majority of Americans couldn't name 4 cities in any state even though we live in the same damn country. So we complement him on his english and ask him if he learned his english in school, and he says no he never really went to school, he got it from listening to international radio and walking into town to find foreign books and magazines and such. Then he says he also speaks spanish and french. I speak decent spanish, and my dad who I was with is fluent, and so we start speaking in spanish, which this guy also speaks perfectly. What I'm saying is, here is a guy, same age as many people on this board who hand weaves his own rugs and sells them on the street so he can make a few bucks a day to feed his family. He never went to school, and has never been more than 50 miles from his home in the most isolated part of the world, yet this guy speaks 4 languages, and has just mentioned 4 cities, some of them small, in a U.S state on the other side of the world. So without pointing fingers or anything, I am asking what excuse we have as Americans, with every priviledge in the world, many of us with families making 6 figures a year. What excuse do we have to not learn absolutely everything we can about the world and all of its people.
