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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this is pretty standard in the USA. Or at least it was when I went to school. I was born in the 1970s... I imagine it has changed some.

Good news is that this BS is generally NOT taught at a college/university level.

Which explains a lot about our country... and our divide... as well. A large percentage of the country has been exposed to education that does not teach such ridiculous beliefs.

So we have "educated" folks with a slightly more realistic view of the world. And then "everybody else" who has only been taught that America is a magical place.

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The great divide: the ones who think America is Great, and the ones who merely think that their own tertiary education group is Great.

My god what an unconstructive stance. I have just now learned about this idea of US exceptionalism, and have just read the linked wikipedia article about it. Apparently it is not supposed to merely be an ineffable magical quality. It is supposed to have some basis in reality. So it can be easily dispelled with a little bit of data. For someone with 3rd level education it should be trivial. Also, purely anecdotal, but several US HN users have responded to me saying they were actually taught this nonsense in their 1st and 2nd level school education.

I haven’t published a stance.

    and the ones who merely think that their 
    own tertiary education group is Great.

I think you managed to combine strawman and false dichotomy fallacies there. Kudos, I suppose.

There are plenty of folks with postsecondary education who think highly of America, and I'm one of them. It is highly flawed, and also a pretty good place. We get a lot of things right.

Let me be crystal clear: what I'm opposed to is simplistic, jingoistic, one-sided "America is the greatest thing ever" fantasies of American exceptionalism. This is how my primary and secondary education, in a fairly decent public school district in the 80s and 90s, generally described America.

And that's mild, as far as "American exceptionalism" goes. My dad's wife is a member of a radical Christian sect. On a regular basis, she mails me glossy pamphlets and brochures describing how America's greatness is literally foretold in the Bible. There are significant numbers of Americans who believe this wholeheartedly.

There is a clear divide between such delusional fantasies, and a more nuanced view of America. But that doesn't mean all of us on the rational side of the divide think it's an awful place or something like that.

As for me, I don't even have a postsecondary degree. Just some postsecondary education. Not exactly ivory tower stuff. But some of it was eye opening. Ideally our public primary/secondary schools would just teach America's flaws as well as its strengths.

Not a strawman at all. It is quite common for people with a post-secondary education to think that they have fundamentally better critical-thinking skills and are much less prone to propaganda, just because they have sat in lecture halls for 4–9 years. And you don’t exactly dispute or disprove that, degree or not.

I personally expect people with post-secondary education to be more ideological than people without one. After all, they’ve been in some kind of educational institution for longer...

    It is quite common for people with a post-secondary 
    education to think that they have fundamentally better 
    critical-thinking skills and are much less prone to 
    propaganda, just because they have sat in lecture halls 
    for 4–9 years

sigh.

There's no way to be clear enough against somebody with a bad-faith agenda.

It's pretty clear you want folks with postsecondary education to disdain those without it.

Perhaps you had a bad experience with education, perhaps it simply feels good to you to tee off on perceived elitism -- whether it actually exists or not. You wouldn't be the first. Some people just get off on that underdog angle.

I regret to inform you that I do not think that postsecondary education automatically makes anybody better than anybody else at any particular thing, and few do, and I've not said such a thing ever. Do I think there's a positive correlation between like, education and critical thinking skills? Yeah, sure. I'd also agree that universities turn out plenty of idiots, and of course some education sucks and can be worse than none at all, and that at best formal education is just one component of being a well-rounded person. All hail the autodidact.

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