Thursday, June 14, 2007

Are the "Opinions" of 11-Year-Olds Evidence of Their Own (Freely-Arrived-At) Anti-Americanism or of That of French Adults Coupled with Indoctrination?

"Damn it, you're doing stupid things that could screw up my world!"
THE ANTI-AMERICANS (a hate/love relationship) examines the complicated mixture of envy, pride, admiration, and cultural misunderstanding that characterizes European views. It’s a situation that has led some commentators to say that “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.”

This film examines the current status of European attitudes towards America in three very different places: France, the United Kingdom, and Poland. Freely mixing humor with provocative commentary, the program shows how Old World attitudes can be both nuanced and simplistic at the same time – sometimes contradictory, sometimes predictable, but always worthy of our interest.
It may be that people such as Pascal Bruckner, Boris Johnson, and Agnieszka Graff are included in the new documentary in which PBS purports to examine anti-Americanism in a neutral, objective light, but offhand, one is wont to ask if the directors and producers have not wondered about the negative (not to mention preposterous) "opinions" of French 11-year-olds regarding America(ns) and how these may have something to do with the adults in whose trust they are (in school as well as at home, where they live with parents who went through the same schooling system), coupled with no little amount of indoctrination

Update: "La version anglophone de ce dessin animé est fréquemment utilisée comme outil pédagogique par les professeurs d’anglais dans les collèges et lycées français."

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