Hi
NeverEnough,
Sorry you feel that way. I was merely trying to explain something that many people have noticed, and that I myself have had a tough time understanding. The difference in interior design quality between most American Class-A motorhome interiors versus Hymer, Concorde, etc. is very noticeable. Other participants in this thread have remarked the same. There are exceptions like Earthroamer and Airstream, for instance, that do an excellent job. But the expression
"grandma's kitchen" used to describe the interiors of many American motorhomes is not my invention. Rather, it is Christopher C. Deam's coinage, the American designer referenced in the previous post -- see
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/g...brings-airstreams-interior-up-to-date-qa.html . In other words, a top-notch American design professional identified the problem years ago.
Furthermore, if you've spent time with American high-school Art Teachers, you will quickly learn that most feel besieged and marginal, within a wider cultural and educational context that does not seem to value what they do. AP Studio Art and AP Art History certainly exist as subjects taught at American high-schools, but only at some high-schools. In 2012 the United States graduated about 3,408,600 high-school students, but only 43,619 took AP Studio Art in its various versions (just 1.3 % of the total number of graduates), and only 22,650 took AP Art History (just 0.66 % of the total, i.e. much less than 1 %) -- see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Studio_Art ,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Art_History ,
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 , and
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_219.10.asp . Art History is certainly not a mandatory subject in the United States the way it is in Italy, where hundreds of thousands of students graduate every year having studied the subject, even if they are not artistically inclined, simply because they attended an Italian "
Liceo". See
http://www.understandingitaly.com/profile-content/education.html ,
https://www.justlanded.com/english/Italy/Italy-Guide/Education/Secondary-school-in-Italy , and
http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/718/Italy-SECONDARY-EDUCATION.html .
Putting the various strands together a "picture" emerges, one that explains for me why the United States has pockets of design excellence, but also why in many parts of the country bad aesthetic taste seems to be ubiquitous. Again, this generalization is not unique to me. Many Americans have said the same, and Europeans say the same all the time......
...However, Europeans then tend to advance a rather simplistic pseudo-explanation: they will often say that the United States is simply an uncultured "young" country filled with people who just by nature have bad taste.
On my own view this kind of pseudo-explanation in terms of "national character" explains nothing, because it simply repeats as cause, the effect that it purports to explain. For instance, some will propose the pseudo-explanation that French cultural and political life is hyper-intellectual, because French "national character" is hyper-intellectual -- see
http://www.economist.com/news/books...mportant-france-they-think-therefore-they-are . Here we learn nothing, because this amounts to mere repetition; it's mere tautology. By way of contrast, when one discovers that Philosophy is not only a mandatory subject in France, but Philosophy is even considered the most important subject in the last two years of secondary school for those taking the more "literary" or "classical" French Baccalaureate, and has been for the last 200 years, ever since Napoleon, then suddenly one has a
real explanation for French hyper-intellectuality, and not a pseudo-explanation -- see
http://www.france24.com/en/20110616...exams-philosophy-europe-curriculum-university and
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22729780.
You may read what I wrote as mean-spirited, but actually it was anything but. If one can find a real, genuine "functional" or ongoing reason why a given social phenomenon persists, then this also becomes something that can change. Continuing the analogy, to say that American national character is inherently anti-intellectual, as some Europeans do say, means that it can't change. Even a partially historical or "genealogical" explanation of the kind advanced by Richard Hofstadter in his classic book,
Anti-intellectualism in American Life, is still too deterministic and fatalistic for my taste -- see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life and
http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170 . There Hofstadter primarily blames Protestant-evangelical Christianity's emotionally intense and anti-cognitive fideism, as well as America's original founding egalitarian ethos, and the rise of corporate-commercial culture. But European societies are now just as democratic-egalitarian as the United States, perhaps even more so; they've become commercialized too; and only one segment of American religiosity today is Protestant-evangelical. If anything, persistent ongoing anti-intellectualism in American life is all the more puzzling given that such a high percentage of Americans obtain college degrees. Whereas if one sees French hyper-intellectual public life as the product of a very specific system of education, one that emphasizes Philosophy, then theoretically at least, if the United States also started teaching Philosophy as a mandatory secondary school subject, then the United States might become a much more intellectual sort of country within a generation. The same would be true of aesthetic taste in the United States: if Art education and the teaching of Art History were better, more valued, and more widespread in the United States, the general level of aesthetic taste would improve.
Now even if Philosophy became a mandatory high-school subject in the United States, Fascist candidates like Donald Trump may still poll well, just as Marine Le Pen does in France -- see
http://www.economist.com/news/europ...helps-national-front-its-best-results-history . Secondary-school Philosophy does not automatically make a country immune to Fascism. Here it may be revealing that you found Donald Trump
"somewhat interesting" in the beginning. Whereas Trump has
never been
"interesting" for me, because it has always seemed obvious to me that Trump is an American version of Le Pen, and that Trump is a Fascist to the core:
Mr Trump seems to be peddling something darker than anti-terror zeal. His strongman shtick, enthusiasm for waterboarding and nonchalance over the beating of a protester at a recent rally (“Maybe he should have been roughed up” give off an incipient whiff of a kind of bouffant fascism.
See
http://www.economist.com/news/unite...-far-unique-may-be-some-consolation-what-lies ,
http://www.economist.com/news/unite...attacks-nativist-sentiment-increasing-america ,
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/12/teflon-trump , and
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/12/trump-muslims .
In any case, what I've written in this thread could not possibly be compared to Donald Trump's shtick, because Trump tends to deliver one-liner sound-bites that his core constituency -- according to
The Economist, Republicans with only a high-school education -- can easily absorb:
He is news because so many rank-and-file Republican voters love his message, putting him at the top of most opinion polls for many months, with a special lock on white voters without a college education.
Whereas as you say, I am
much more verbose! :sombrero:
All best wishes,
Biotect
