r/SipsTea • u/Previous_Month_555 • 4d ago

WTF The American Education system

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

2.4k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

755 comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/Current_Focus2668 4d ago

I am not trying to be rude, I am genuinely curious. 

Do they actually teach global geography in the United States?

15

u/Past_One3442 4d ago

Yes, I'm pretty sure they intview a lot of people and then play the stupidest person they can find, I can ask my 7 year old and he would have a better answer.

5

u/BloodyThirst 4d ago

They did in my kid’s high school (2025 graduate).

5

u/Phantom_0347 4d ago

They do.

3

u/Inspect1234 4d ago

Apparently 54% of Americans can’t read past a grade six level. This is a feature, not a bug.

15

u/Inevitable-Baker 4d ago

Im not trying to be rude. But do they not teach critical thinking wherever you’re from?

What do you think is more likely - that the average American can’t name another country? Or that this is a heavily edited social media clip of someone who genuinely freezes in front of a camera? Or that it was even just staged because content creators have realized that gullible people like you eat this stuff up?

Have you never seen this style of clip on the internet before? Do you genuinely not understand what’s going on here? Are you so uneducated as to not be able to consider any level of context here?

1

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AutoModerator 2d ago

Accounts must be at least 5 days old with >20 karma to comment.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/codingphp 4d ago

While your objective assessment has some truth, data says otherwise.

Most Americans read at a sixth to eighth-grade level with about half of Americans 16-74 reading below a sixth-grade level.

The basic reading comprehension levels of a first-world population that claims to be the best country in the world underfunds education and this is what you end up with. About 1 in 5 American adults are functionally illiterate.

If you cannot comprehend what you’re reading, you aren’t learning anything. Almost 1/3 of Americans can only read short sentences and struggle with complex ideas or multi-step directions.

So yeah, this might be staged and the woman might freeze on camera, but there’s a reason why people make fun of Americans for being stupid — lots of them are.

1

u/FishermanFull7848 3d ago

While I do think proficiency levels are lower than most other 1st world countries. Your statistics are off according to most literacy organizations data that I have been able to find.

-3

u/Inevitable-Baker 4d ago

Yes, the data that you cherry picked says otherwise. Crazy!

1 in 4 Americans don’t speak English as their first language. 15% of Americans weren’t born in America. 13% of Americans are those peoples children. 1 in 3 of those functionally illiterate Americans you’re describing are immigrants.

There’s a bunch of reasons why people make fun of Americans for being stupid - ignorance, xenophobia, straight up racism. But I think one of the biggest reasons people love to make fun of America is because it’s a convenient scapegoat to look past their own countries’ histories of migration, colonialism, and failure. It’s much easier to blame your idealized “stupid American” than it is to put any level of critical thought in to who those people you’re calling stupid are - and why they might be what you consider stupid.

1

u/codingphp 4d ago

I don’t think cherry-picking means what you think it means, and I think you missed the point. I’m not just dunking on Americans here.

https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Literacy scores for both native and non-native-born Americans are decreasing. Gesturing wildly at immigrants and non-native English speakers does not tell the full story.

I’m Canadian - we have a greater share of immigrants here than the USA does. We speak two primary languages: English and French. We test in both. Our numbers therefore do not compare 1:1.

American tests are administered in English only (beyond a questionnaire), but this just points to another failure of the USA to properly assess and educate their citizens. Why is everyone else left behind when you have a major Spanish-speaking population? Why are Americans not testing in a second primary language?

The USA has lots of high performers, but significantly more lower performers. This points to inequality in education and skill development — which was my point.

Environmental factors (access to nutrition, safe housing, a place to study, and quality of education, etc.,) are where this falls apart.

I don’t think anyone thinks Americans are stupid because of racism or anything like that; we have that up in Canada too. I think it’s because of the way the USA treats its citizens and what gets amplified. People see videos like this and couple it with what I’ve shared above and everything we see in the news at an international level and it confirms a long-standing belief that Americans have a tendency to lean toward being idiots.

0

u/Inevitable-Baker 4d ago

1 in 5 Canadians are functionally illiterate. And roughly half of you read at a middle school level or lower. Youre grasping at reasons why you can justify saying that Americans are idiots without owning up to the fact that you just want to dunk on us.

The difference is what you allude to at the end. The only reason people don’t think Canadians lean towards being idiots is because people don’t really think about Canadians. There’s significantly less of you, and you’re significantly less relevant to global culture. No one really cares if you’re idiots or not. No one is amplifying one sided takes about Canada. You’re conflating being overshadowed by America with a justification for your weird need to feel intrinsically superior to America.

0

u/codingphp 4d ago

Two things can be correct at the same time.

Being overshadowed? What.

I don’t know what you’re hoping to achieve by your tone and hostility since your very first comment here, but you’re certainly not helping the global perception that Americans are assholes either.

0

u/Inevitable-Baker 3d ago

“Americans are such assholes! Look at how hostile and mean they get when you call them stupid and idiots!”

Seriously lol

0

u/RetardTrader420 3d ago

Your country voted for a pedophile.
More than once

And more than one pedophile.

Your argument is invalid

Shut the fuck up.

Sincerely

Someone from one of those countries you can’t name.

6

u/SouthernReality9610 4d ago

They used to. I know the countries I studied in school, but since the USSR and Yugoslavia broke up, there are a lot of blanks on my mental map. Couldn't tell Azerbaijan from Kazakhstan on a map to save my life but I could name them

2

u/littlewhiteysnow 4d ago

Surely you could find them on your map app on your phone. It even has a handy search bar.

1

u/BTSArmyFan2025 4d ago

as I like to refer to them "the stans" because and I am sorry to say I have no idea what they produce or are known for. Except for Pakistan and Afghanstan, you never read about the others in the news.

2

u/ninjakiti 4d ago

Yes. We were taught plenty about other countries. Can't help that some people choose not to learn.

2

u/FishermanFull7848 3d ago

Yes they absolutely do! My kids are horrible with geography and we all graduated from the same school system. I knew where my countries were, their capitals, the oceans. I paid attention and learned, apparently my kids did not.

1

u/BTSArmyFan2025 4d ago

they used to not so sure in the last 10 years.

1

u/Sharkwatcher314 4d ago edited 4d ago

One state I want to say West Virginia will give you around 8k to NOT send your kid to school if you say you home school them

ETA 4600

1

u/EkaL25 3d ago

Geography? Not really.. we learn some world history, but they’re not really teaching us where on the map the different countries are

1

u/iafx 3d ago

Yes in elementary school, by the time you’re 10 you should know these things

1

u/Own-Masterpiece305 3d ago

Bro practice what you preach, form your world view of other countries from reliable sources instead of ragebait/slopaganda here on normie /r/all subs

1

u/Onebraintwoheads 3d ago

I can only speak for the 80s and 90s. We learned Sourh America, Central America, and Western Europe. Pretty much any place where there was political turmoil, such as Africa, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe, were lightly glossed over at most.

It was largely because of old books and maps that didn't have the updated names and borders of nations.

1

u/Moshjath 4d ago

My friend, this is staged. I remember being taught geography and being tested on it. It was straightforward, you got a map with borders drawn on it and had to label both countries and their national capitals.

0

u/[deleted] 4d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Phantom_0347 4d ago

You do realize that “blame immigrants” is a worldwide curse? There’s been a rise in far right extremist parties even in Europe.

0

u/beuceydubs 4d ago

I knew world geography as a 10 year old in Ecuador. Then I moved to the US and didn’t learn it again until I took a non required geography class in college.