Week 4 Posting 4

I was not born in this county so I find this assignment I bit difficult. However, I came to this country when I was 12 years old and remember some things that I was taught in school that didn’t make sense to me. I am not criticizing American, I am a proud American citizen just expressing constructive criticism, believe me, there are terrible things being drilled into your head in my country too; but these stood out for me even when I was young.

First is the narrative of the Constitution where it says “all men are created equal”, teachers proudly present these words to you as a wonderful phrase from our founding fathers. Well, this was written by white high and middle class men, some of them slave owners. It doesn’t make any sense in a country where there is still so much racism and discrimination. Not only am I talking about the whole race thing but “all MEN” meant just that, not women. Why all men and not all people? There is no doubt these people were smart and carefully picked their words when writing the Constitution. Chomsky once said that is difficult for people to tell you directly that they are proud and like to own slaves and make them work for free; instead, they use persuasive speech to make sense of the atrocity.

The other narrative I remember was the Pledge of Allegiance. This was attributed to the patriotism of our founding fathers however; it was not until 1954 that “one Nation under God” was added. This not only did not come from our founding fathers which by the way were for the most part not Christian but was a deliberate attempt to differentiate the policies of the United States from those of communism around the world. Leaders specifically wanted the “under God” part added because communist countries were known to refute religion.

All that said, to answer the question of what values are taught in our educational system, one can deduct that “all men are created equal” and “one Nation under God” have instilled a false sense that all Americans are the same, treated fairly and this is the ideal place for any human being to be. Discrimination and racism become issues that are not important and serious enough to take action against and our way of living is the correct way, everyone else around the world who does not look like us, or act like us or believe in the same God as us are just wrong.

In my humble opinion, this rhetoric was and is being used in schools with good intentions; however trying to instill patriotism in this way is very harmful especially for ethnic minorities and women. Furthermore, the image that Americans portray overseas keeps getting worse, through our international policies and even many times as tourists we present ourselves as self centered ethnocentric individuals.

One last thing, did you guys get the email on the lecture this coming Wednesday? Associate Professor of History and Director of the Ancient Studies Program Sviatoslav Dmitriev will give a public lecture entitled "The Origins of Modern Democracy: the Modern Myth and the Ancient Reality on Wednesday, February 9th, beginning at 3:30 pm in Burkhardt Building Room 109. He will be talking about this idea of Democracy which we adopted from the Ancient world, unfortunately we also adopted all the flaws, democracy for all does not really mean for all, just for a few. Our educational system has always used the word "Democracy" as the ideal type of society but is it really?