"Alberto Monteiro" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> John Garcia wrote:
> >
> >>So? That just proves my point, that br youth is massively
> >>taught to hate the USA - even with lies. I don't know about
> >>other Latino American countries, but I suspect that things
> >>are not different.
> >
> >they may not be. so, why should Brazilian educators teach lies about
> >another country, even one so hated as "El Norte"?
> >
> "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result
> from stupidity." Maybe they believe things that make the USA more evil
> than it is :-)
And early educators are notoriously ill-informed. When my wife was getting
Montessori certification we were both stunned at some of the bogus science
being taught as gospel to teachers who would then blindly pass it on to
1st-grade children. The one that sticks with me is "turtles evolved from
ankylosaurs". *shudder* That's the sort of thing that you invent on your own
when you're 4 and looking at books; it's your early teachers that need to be
correcting such things, not reinforcing them.
I think most of our biases come from misconceptions learned as young
children (< age 8). Anything learned before that age has got to be very hard
to compensate for. Young kids are going to pick up things like bogus science
or an anti-American bias at a very young age and never overcome that unless
forced to - I know I thought the US was EEEEEEVIL through at least Grade 9.
Many of my friends from university still think I've sold out, but that could
be working for Microsoft rather than living in the US. :)
On a tangent* (I like those), I recommend binge-reading a bunch of Robert L.
Forward books. Since doing that a year or two ago it's become a bit of a
habit to view the world around me as physics-in-progress, seeing momentum
transfers and envisioning the effects of air pressure in common scenarios.
In retrospect, a pretty cool high-school physics text would be a near-future
SF novel annotated with equations.
Joshua
* When Susan and I drive to Oregon to visit her parents we pass through a
town called Tangent, leading to the inevitable jokes about turning off.
