Thank you for sharing your experience--especially the scenario with the English teacher and thoughts on the Vietnam war. Both resonated with me. You are an astute observer of the deeply-rooted wrong beliefs that our 19th Century Education legacy has has given us. This may have fueled Carl Sandburg when he wrote:

:The feet of the rats

scribble on the door sills;

the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints

chatter the pedigrees of the rats

and babble of the blood

and gabble of the breed

of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers

of the rats.

And the wind shifts

and the dust on a door sill shifts

and even the writing of the rat footprints

tells us nothing, nothing at all

about the greatest city, the greatest nation

where the strong men listened

and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.