America the Baffled: One in Four Americans...

[Trip]

Originally Posted by Avatard

Oh, I see...so you use everything you learned in school.

Cultural awareness counts for nothing?

Brazilian schools all teach English. Most Brazilians can't even get a fucking visa to visit here, even though they are some of the highest spending tourists abroad...such a waste, all that education, huh?

It's fluff for a lot of people. They will never use it, just like your Brazilians that learned English and will never use it for a meaningful purpose.

For a lot of those peope, probably would of been better time use in a subject that person enjoyed that could translate better into employment.

[Homeslice]

Originally Posted by Avatard

Oh, I see...so you use everything you learned in school.

Cultural awareness counts for nothing?

Brazilian schools all teach English. Most Brazilians can't even get a fucking visa to visit here, even though they are some of the highest spending tourists abroad...such a waste, all that education, huh?

How does learning a language provide cultural awareness? Language is like math, there's no culture being gained.

Culture = learning how different people ACT, what their values are, their cooking, music, shit like that. Ain't gonna get that from a Rosetta Stone class.

[Avatard]

Originally Posted by Homeslice

How does learning a language provide cultural awareness? Language is like math, there's no culture being gained.

Culture = learning how different people ACT, what their values are, their cooking, music, shit like that. Ain't gonna get that from a Rosetta Stone class.

It's not worth my time to explain it. You exemplify all that's wrong with the American attitude towards the rest of the world.

Very sad.

Wait...I think I might have something even you can grasp:

If you can speak the language of others, you can discuss their choices in fashion. That work for ya?

[Homeslice]

Originally Posted by Avatard

If you can speak the language of others, you can discuss their choices in fashion. That work for ya?

So if I lived in bumfuck Nebraska, and I took classes in Greek, how am I going to discuss shit with anyone? Aint' gonna be any Greek speakers in bumfuck Nebraska. And last I checked there weren't any Greek cable TV channels. I guess you could fuck around on the internet and find something, but that's about it. Personally it wouldn't be worth the effort unless I had near-daily interaction with Greeks, or went to Greece and lived there for a bit.

[Avatard]

Yeah, Greek is what I was thinking. Run with that.

Brilliant.

[Homeslice]

[101lifts2]

Originally Posted by Trip

....Sorry, we need to weed out programs and make college affordable and educate our leaders with classes that are actually worth a damn.

You and I are both electircal engineers. I could ask you how to do a Fourier transform and you wouldn't remember in the least because you do not use it regularly. However, doing these and many other complex computations has enabled you to build up analytic and thinking skills.

College's main focus is to teach yourself to think and analyze. Remembering book knowledge is good for a test, but it doesn't separate you from the other non-college educated people.

[racedoll]

Originally Posted by Trip

The maintenance personnel of a manufacturing plant isn't going to need to know foreign languages to do their job. The blue collars that will be selling the product to foreign countries might want to learn some though.

In most cases I agree. However, if you are maintenance at the company I work for, German would be very useful. We have 6 presses that are German so when they need serious work, we have to get people from the manufacturer in to do it. Although the guys that come in speak English, it would make communication much easier if our guys new their language.

[Trip]

Originally Posted by racedoll

In most cases I agree. However, if you are maintenance at the company I work for, German would be very useful. We have 6 presses that are German so when they need serious work, we have to get people from the manufacturer in to do it. Although the guys that come in speak English, it would make communication much easier if our guys new their language.

That's where the blue collar guys come in. The blue collar guys like vendors should know the language they sell the product to and be able to do customer support in that language. The maintenance guys are the grunts. It would be a waste of resources to language train them.

[tommymac]

Originally Posted by Trip

A lot of our colleges are turning into a joke. We have to up entrance fees, so we can make sure Douchebag Tom can take Ancient Asian Art Studies and then wind up working in his local Best Buy as an assistant manager. If he is lucky then he can find a way to hang around at college and get a doctorate in something equally as worthless and train another generation in some piece of shit subject which further handicaps the American population against foreigners coming into our country and getting high level engineering/science degrees worth a damn at our schools and going back home and advancing their country while we get stuck with Dr. Douchebag Tom.

Sorry, we need to weed out programs and make college affordable and educate our leaders with classes that are actually worth a damn.

WTF did I do to get dragged into this