From hanging out around the US Embassy in the Philippines, I developed an appreciation for how the State Department shares American culture overseas, at many levels. This enterprise involves scouting for quintessential Americana and packaging it for distribution in other cultures.
Along these lines, the international schools, rebranding from American, with some reverting, have a role in showcasing the latest curricula. Even if your kid is not American (your family is from Greece or Singapore) you might still admire the quality of an international school education, and so seek out this opportunity.
Buckminster Fuller has at times been a poster child for what's positive and promising about the USA. That his thinking is making a comeback, this time with more geometry savvy (beyond the domes and spheres) is going to help with America's reputation. "No, we're not all neocons" is the message, i.e. we don't all think like knuckle-draggers from some cartoon Stone Age. We're not the Flintstones.
Of course the sad truth is a lot of bedrock Americans are Flintstone types and march to the tune of the propaganda drummers. They're hooked on cable TV and the drugs pushed thereon. They've been programmed, more or less in the Quaker sense (where we value "unprogrammed" as an option). Putting a best foot forward need not mean covering up the truth, that we have other feet.
Of course everyone comes with programming. The question is whether one is still capable of auto-updating. The curriculum itself is a good example. Looking back from 2024, it should by now at least include Occupy and talk about BS jobs ala Dr. David Graeber.
Or it might still be stone age.
International school parents form a valuable test audience and focus group, given their above-average cultural sophistication.
Ironically, given what here sounds like anti-caveman talk, anti-Flintstone PR, we have these wedge-like objects (cite BEAST) that might be called "arrowheads" i.e. they have a sharpness to them, these A&B, T&E, S particles, ephemeral spatial partitions we practice our fractions with. 24As make a Tetra(D) and so on.
The primitivity of the concepts (partitions in space) has a neolithic flavor and is suitable for initial uptake via elementary school, with further elaboration in higher grade levels. Bring on the surds!
However, we cannot always depend on a preoccupied, militarily-obsessed USG to take full advantage of its soft PR talents. Here, in this connection, Hollywood has been known to pick up the slack i.e. distribution networks in the private sector have their own ways of marketing curriculum content, if only tangentially in the form of commercials and product placements.
If Zometool is taking off in China, this may have less to do with the American schools (for embassy brats, like I was to some extent), and more to do with the Chinese equivalent of QVC, the televised home shopping show.
The Fuller stuff is potentially faddish periodically and independently of what the education schools are currently teaching (or more likely not teaching, if dinosaurs).
