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Studying politics: the U.S. vs African Teaching Style
One thing that I promised myself when I left home to study abroad in America was that I will never study political science again. I wanted to charter a new way away from political theory and the study of resource allocation to the actual decision of how resources are produced and consumed, economics.
Little did I know what was awaiting me, I had to take an Intro to Politics class as a requirement for my Economics Major. I knew this was a bad idea initially, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. From day one, the bias in the understanding of politics by the professor was open. He had his guns blazing, bringing down any socialist thinkers like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin while praising capitalist ideologies with glory and hands raised to the sky.
Not once or twice, but several times in an hour’s class, the professor used the United States as the epitome of political invention who found themselves in uncharted waters of democracy and the electoral college. These notions ignored the fact that America was built on slavery and human rights abuse. There is a time he even mentioned in class that the United States was the country that miraculously coined the use of an electoral college, which is absolutely not true. Even before Europeans discovered the new lands called the Americas, the Catholic Church used a form of Electoral…
