I attended public school during the ‘60s and ‘70s, while they still had a bunch of conservative teachers in the classrooms (at least in the lily-white city in which I grew up). I was indoctrinated by right-wing teachers who demanded that we recite The Pledge of Allegiance every morning, who taught us that white Europeans discovered America, who taught us that our form of government was superior to that of the Soviet Union and Communist China, and who pretty much toed the government line up and down.

When properly performed, indoctrination goes undetected by its victims. We were young and our minds were impressionable, and we took for granted that what our teachers were spouting and spewing was fact. We could pretty much corroborate on our fingers that 2 + 2 = 4, and "cat" was spelled c - a - t in every book we read. It was only logical to accept the dogma that George Washington never told a lie, Abraham Lincoln started the Civil War in order to free the slaves, Teddy Roosevelt spoke softly, etc., etc., etc.

It wasn't until I grew up and started thinking for myself…wait a minute, it wasn't even until a long time after that. Even when I did realize that a lot of what passes for fact is just somebody else’s opinion, most of what I had been taught as a child remained so many undeniable truths. After all, my fingers still told me that 2 + 2 = 4 and there were now hand-held calculators to back me up; not only was "cat" was spelled c - a - t in every book I read, but also in every paper I wrote—I had become part of the status quo.

So although it had been admitted to me somewhere along the line that George Washington might have told a fib once or twice and while my 11th-grade history teacher did secretly let us know that Abraham Lincoln had actually gone to war to hold the union together and not to free the slaves (but don’t tell the principal he said so), I pretty much went along in my comfortable adult life honestly and reassuredly believing that we did, in fact, have the greatest society in the history of the world. After all, I never went to bed hungry, and we did pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Somewhere along the way, though, the reactionary right lost its iron grip on everything, and we started hearing the other side in the media and even in higher education. (These days, truth has even reached the halls of lower education.) Hearing claims contrary to my long-held beliefs gave my inquisitive mind "permission" to first question the "facts" I had been taught, and then to reach opposite conclusions where warranted.

One of the most important revelations was the first time I heard someone declare something to the effect of "All societies are different from every other, but no society is superior to any other." This made sense, because of course each society believes itself to be the best (if it found another better one, it would just copy the other to improve itself); and who should be entitled to make that determination? Us? Who died and elected us God?

My mind easily and happily made this adjustment, and it made my interactions with others much easier over the next umpteen years. Rather than arguing certain cultural points, I just went with the flow and got along with people better than ever.

This came in especially handy when I began travelling around the world. I was able to study in Russia and meet Russians with an open mind, and without the desire to "teach" them how to improve their country. Of course, I had long recognized that the Russian people were just as good as we were, because that was one of the right-wing methods of stoking our patriotism and solidifying our dedication to the cause: "The Russian people are just like us; only their government is evil. The Russians themselves long for a government just like ours."

I was a non-traditional student, returning to grad school in my late 30s; and while there were many other non-traditional students, the majority of students were in their early to mid-20s and had not been indoctrinated by the monolithic right that had been responsible for my education. I was fortunate indeed to have learned my lesson more or less on my own, because this allowed me to fit in more easily and not show the ignorance of my age during class discussions. I was even able to remind some of my younger classmates that we were "different, not better" than the people around us when we studied overseas.

And apparently there were millions of others who similarly enlightened themselves and then raised their own children accordingly. I heard this week about a survey just conducted indicating that 79% of today’s college students do not believe that American culture is superior to other cultures. While the limited reports I heard on the news did not go into detail and did not use the phrase "different, not better," the results that were reported certainly indicate tremendous progress.

• Four out of five college students now realize that the Thai tradition of having a woman walk ten paces behind her husband is merely an ingrained custom, and does not mean that American culture is better.
• Four out of five college students now realize that just because the Saudis don’t let women leave the house unaccompanied, don’t let them walk in public without wearing a burqa, and don’t let them operate machinery (such as automobiles), that doesn’t mean that American culture is better.
• Four out of five college students now realize that just because the Japanese still prohibit women from working in traditionally male positions and prevent them from becoming managers, that does not mean that American culture is better.
• Four out of five college students now realize that if African tribes want to perform certain operations on their females, then just because Americans find these procedures distasteful does not mean that American culture is better.
• Four out of five college students now realize that if the Chinese want to put pregnant women through forced abortions in order to prevent a woman from having a second child, this is a cultural decision best left to each individual country and does not mean that American culture is better.

I didn’t hear whether these percentages were broken down by sex, and it’s possible that a higher percentage of American college males believes that these varying practices are different but not inferior. However, even if every male answered that America is "different, not better," that still means that approximately 3 out of 5 American college females believe that Thai, Saudi, Japanese, African, Chinese, and every other culture is just as good as American culture. And that’s real progress compared to just 30 years ago, when the typical American would have cast a disdainful eye on these diverse practices and judgmentally declared, "That’s barbaric."

We now realize that we are not morally justified in making value judgments on other societies. Diversity is the strength of the global economy, just as it is the strength of any individual domestic business; as such, it must not only be preserved, but encouraged to flourish. We may never know exactly how close we came to slamming the door on this most precious of global resources: had America continued with its holier-than-thou attitude for just 10 or 20 more years, then our fortuitous position as economic bully of the world might just have helped us succeed in forcing our values on every other nation on earth.

We see in hindsight that our educational institutions fell out of the iron grip of the right wing just in the nick of time.