An Incomplete Education

"Unfortunately, in most of our schools the history of Europe and North America is taught as if it were the history of the world. The rest of the world is referred to only when Europeans or Americans were invading or trading. There has recently been a small change for the better but not nearly enough."  ~from Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir by Louis L’Amour ©1989

The way I was taught about Europe and the way I was taught about Africa and Asia were very different.

I know that Europe consists of many different cultures in a rather small area, and that they haven't always gotten along well with each other.  I know that each culture eats different foods, wears different clothes, attends different churches, sings different songs, dances different dances, tells different stories.

But when it comes to the much larger continents of Africa and Asia, I was taught as if each were sort of a homogeneous lump, a great big mass of people who all looked, acted, and thought exactly alike.

That's a rather uninteresting, not to mention dehumanizing, way to look at the world, and I have to think it has contributed to the current xenophobia that is currently dominating American politics.