A lot of times, people on the Internet (and sometimes even in real life), when lamenting some defect in humanity will begin their sentence with the word “Americans”, as if Americans are the only people in the world who have questionable societal weaknesses.
Normally I roll my eyes at this. People are people everywhere, and a lot of “America’s weaknesses” are really humanity’s.
However, culture is also culture, and different cultures are different, so there are bound to be some things America really is bad at. Here are a couple examples I could think of.
• Schooling. The American educational system isn’t bad, per se. We hear a lot of the stories we hear about Taiwanese and German kids learning differential equations in third grade when American kids struggle with adding fractions, but those stories are usually missing some vitally important context (like, for example, maybe the Taiwanese kids have no humanities, art, or history, and represent only the top 2%).
However, one aspect where Amercian schooling just sucks is the emphasis on obedience, and absolute trust in the instructor. I believe this creates an attitude in Americans that authority is something that must be placated at all times. This carries over to real life. I’ve noticed that a lot of Americans completely overestimate the risk of confronting management.
Other countries don’t seem to have this issue. People seem to have enjoyed schooling more in other countries, and be more at ease at their work.
• Geography. I don’t really think this is the educational system’s fault. We do a reasonable job teaching geography, but for cultural reasons Americans don’t retain it, whereas they do much better in other countries. This, I believe, is mostly due to the fact that it doesn’t really matter much what direction you are heading in in America, you will end up in a place that speaks the same language and has more or less the same culture, except near somet of the borders.
• Freeway driving. European philosophy tends to favor not hard limits on speed, as we do in America, but on obeying respectful driving rules such as never cruising in the left lane and not tailgating.
Street driving, however, is another matter entirely.
• Another thing that Americans do on the road that is beyond retarded is to merge a mile ahead of a merge point. People who merge early will then get mad when someone who isn’t retarded decides to drive down the lane everyone is getting out of.
Studies have shown that staying in lane and zippering at the merge point will get more cars through the merge faster, and cause traffic to back up less. But that’s beside the point. The point is, Americans get irrirated at “cheaters” that they are deliberately enabling. If everyone just stayed in their lane and zippered at the merge point, nobody could “cheat”.
In Europe, people zipper at merges.
