Multiculturalism vs. geography education:

Multiculturalism vs. geography education: The war has revealed that Americans know terribly little about much of the peoples of the world. This is in part because geography went out of fashion as a school subject decades ago. The multi-culti folks definitely don't want more classes about other foreign peoples that boys would find interesting. For example, my son's enormously heavy math book is full of pictures of things like Kenyans playing soccer and a caption that says "Kenyans like playing soccer." Obviously, the point is that Kenyans are just like middle class American kids - they like soccer! But that's borrrring. That's like saying: "Kenyans like to eat food!" Ho hum. Information consists of contrasts, as in the 0's and 1's of digital data. We learn very little by hearing how other people are just like us, and our brains certainly can't use that to put together a distinct picture of them.

Now, if you had a picture of the Masai draining blood from the neck of a cow and a caption saying that the Masai live on milk and cow's blood, boys would be interested in that. And if you had a picture of Masai girl on her wedding day and a caption that said that this bride was bought from her father for 40 cows, girls would be interested in that.

Similarly, the Pathan (Pashtun) culture of Afghanistan is strangely fascinating to Western males - Churchill, Kipling, and other Victorians were partly horrified, partly entranced by it. James Michener said that Afghanistan is the one country he would most like to revisit. But everything that's interesting about Pathan life is horribly non-PC, so it's best just to ignore them completely.

Schools can't teach about what other cultures are actually all about, because what they typically are interested in - war, distinct sex roles, patriarchy, sexual jealousy and control of female reproduction, hunting, religion, vengeance, aristocracy, ethnocentrism, etc. - are all things that kids are being taught are what makes the West uniquely bad compared to these very PC other cultures that are being oppressed by the west. I absolutely loved geography in grade school and look how evil I turned out to be.

From the PC perspective, it's much safer to teach abstract mathematics than geography, which is why schools are pretty good at math these days (at least when teaching kids who are genetically capable) and terrible at geography. - 12/4/01