Sorry for the clickbait title. Have a blurry picture of a cat as an apology.
But as someone who does NSFW art for a living, talking to a client who reads and writes at the level of a 12 year old (and shows the same level of ignorance about the world outside their country) makes me really uncomfortable. Technically they're a legal adult, but I feel like I'm talking to a child.
I like to be friendly and pleasant with clients, but when the conversation feels like I'm explaining very basic concepts like how weather or seasons work in other countries, or how an 8 hour drive isn't shorter because we use kilometers instead of miles, it just feels wrong when paired with the adult artwork I'm also drawing for them.
Like, legally it's fine, but it does make me wonder if it is ok to draw NSFW artwork for someone who doesn't really feel like an adult intellectually.
Also #notallamericans, but I'm sure Americans on here know full well what I'm talking about, and have to deal with it a lot more frequently than I do.
EDIT: This is less supposed to be "Americans dumb" and more like "Some Americans seem to have the knowledge base of a child and that makes it hard to work with them in an adult context." I'm not just trying to start an America bashing thread here, I'm more venting about a very specific problem where I have to create adult art for adults who have the writing style and comprehension levels of children.
Americans do not value knowledge. The purpose of schools is to pass tests. Learning is something you do if you have to pass a test. Learning for learning's own sake is weird and gay.
Universities are shops where you buy access to jobs. Any degree a fifth-grader cannot directly map to a job is useles as well as weird and gay.
If you are a real masculine manly man you don't need to go to college and get a useless degree. You just need to wear a hard hat and stay away from anything that's weird or gay. If you want to be a superman of businesses entrepreneurship and innovation you should go to college only to drop out as a flex. All the cool billionaires whose careers you are totally able to emulated without having obscene generational wealth dropped out because they were too cool for school. Staying in school to get a degree is weird and gay.
From infancy you have been brought up to be a consumer. When Jesus came riding down from heaven on a bald eagle and handed the founding fathers the stone tablets with the declaration of independence and the constitution, the first and most important right afforded to you as an American was the right to consume without friction. You should have access to exactly as many easily digestible sugary treats as you want. Demanding effort of you is a violation of your constitutional rights. Holding you accountable for saying nonsense is cruel and unusual punishment. Putting in the work is weird and gay.
In the marketplace of ideas the client is always right. You might think the earth is round, I might think the earth is flat. I have the right to have my opinion and my opinion can be just as good as yours and we are many people who are sick and tired of being looked down on by the elites just for thinking differently and if you tell me I'm wrong then you are being the asshole. Actually having expertise on anything outside of pop culture trivia is weird and gay.
The average American can't read on a sixth grade level. They think Big Ben is the capital of Europe. They get genuinely confused by learning that American laws do not apply in China. But at least they are not weird and gay.
I had an assignment in my geography class where they were assigning people continents and told them to find the flags of those continents and what language they spoke. When I explained there were many flags in Asia, they told to just pick the dominant one. Y'know, the one. It was a group project, and I took over and made sure we did at least a bunch of Asian countries. I got India, China, Japan, South Korea (chud me didn't think we even could research DPRK) Vietnam, Russia, and I think some Middle Eastern countries. But yeah, it was a bad assignment. In the teacher's defense, she was an elementary school keyboarding teacher forced to teach high school geography. It was an easy class as she had no idea what she was teaching.
"Find some flags and languages of X continent" is high school level in America? And somehow they mangle it to become "find the flag and the language of X continent"? And they let elementary school teachers teach high school?
It was a private school that did kindergarten through high school, but yeah, it was bizarre.
As far as I know if you've got a bachelors degree in pretty much anything you can be a teacher. The teaching license you get to become a first grade teacher is the same as the one you get to become a high school teacher.
The rules change state to state because there is not, and never has been, a federal department for regulating education. The only thing the department of education has ever really done year to year is hand out grants. It gates access to federal money, but they do not broadly manage what qualifies as a teacher, that is left up to the states, same with curriculum.
The best part about it is that Texas is the largest consumer of text books, and it's hard to write textbooks for every state, so the companies just pander to Texas's standards of education and other states usually just fall in line and purchase the same ones
Yup that is very true! Its not something widely understood. When liberals were getting mad about the Trump administration "gutting" the Department of Education, all I could do is laugh. Once you understand that the Texas standard exists because the DoE has always been a toothless organization, then you realize it doesn't matter if the DoE is gutted.
Most red states are subsidized on blue state tax dollars, which means if the DoE isn't handing out grants at all, red states will suffer more. Now in practice that likely hasn't happened yet, but that's a very likely outcome.