Response: Deliberate Lack of Understanding

In response to Adam Tobin's post "The Western Bias" (April 21, 2012):

I agree that the American educational system strongly encourages students to remain ignorant about and prejudiced against other cultures and religions.  However, I do not think that curriculum makers do this to shelter the youth of the United States; instead, I think that they do it to ensure that adult Americans will possess a strong, and probably unjustified, sense of patriotism which enables them to ignore the atrocities that America may commit against other nations, often in order to procure resources to boost the economy.  As an example: if most Americans believe that all Muslims, and all people in the Middle East (if they are ignorant enough, they may assume that the two are synonymous) are evil fanatics who want to bomb America until no one there is alive, they will not object when the government sends troops over to the Middle East.  They will assume that the troops are there to fight the evil, American-hating, backwards, and ultimately fictional people who live there, rather than realising that the war may instead be primarily for economic reasons.  Furthermore, if in the process of 'winning the war' in the Middle East, America acquires access to large amounts of fossil fuels, they will simply claim that these are just spoils of war, and that America has every right to them.