Trust me, I know this thing painful to watch all the way through, but please do it, and then reflect with me upon what this ridiculous person’s monologue portends. Her name is Savrienna Abrre, and she is now residing in Canada, as she tells us repeatedly, compelling the response, “GOOD!” That’s one less vote for, oh, I don’t know, Robert Kennedy Jr, or maybe Woody Woodpecker.
Savrienna is the kind of person, apparently, who becomes a social media star, which is to say, she’s a narcissistic cretin. It does take some kind of talent to babble on like she does so assaultively and continuously, smiling like a zany and never thinking, “Wow, like, I’m sounding like a complete idiot!,” but I don’t know what that talent is called. I am willing to lay odds that she is courting the same fate at the hands of her husband as the subject of this limerick by the late, great Edward Gory:
There was a young woman whose stammer
Was atrocious, and so was her grammar.
But they were not improved
When her husband was moved
To bash in her teeth with a hammer…
Savrienna blames the American public school system. As I am a constant critic of that institution, aka, “smoldering ruin,” you might think that I sympathize with her, but I do not in the least. She is an incurious fool of stunning intellectual laziness, whose choice of friends and associates has reflected her shallowness.
No school should have to teach anyone that Alaska isn’t an island. Globes are available everywhere: we had two in our home growing up, and I find it difficult to believe that Savrienna didn’t encounter one or more in one of her grade school classes. Apparently she never bothered to spin it, or learn anything from it. She would have learned about Alaska by reading something more challenging than a Harry Potter book, such as Jack London, who wrote quite a bit about the region.
At the end of her marathon logorrhea attack, Savrienna tries to prove that she knows stuff, including all of the U.S. Presidents in order. I advocate children learning U.S. history this way, but needless to say except to dimwits like this woman, simply memorizing their names is useless. The point is to attach the names to important events in the Presidents’ terms in office. Outside of him being impeached, by far the most important event in President Andrew Johnson’s brief administration was “Seward’s Folly,” Secretary of State William Seward’s negotiated purchase of the Alaskan Territory from the Russian Empire to the United States for $7.2 million in 1867. It is often cited as one a handful of lucky breaks that saved the U.S., since if the Soviet Union had still owned Alaska during the Cold War, we probably would have had Soviet missiles raining down on us like Israel get rocketed by Gaza.
She also claims she can name “all” the dinosaurs. Sure. There are approximately a thousand named species of dinosaurs now. I bet she can’t even name all of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park II.
I didn’t learn about Alaska, Presidents, dinosaurs and most of what I know in school. I learned by something called “reading books” and “listening to my parents,” “being curious about the world around me,” and talking to people from different backgrounds and with varying interests.
I also watched television and movies, and paid attention. It isn’t hard, or boring, unless you have the brainpan of a chipmunk, like Savrienna. As a TV-addicted kid, I used to watch “Sgt. Preston of the Yukon.” (“ON King! On, you huskies!”), and figured out early on that this province in Canada bordered on Alaska. “North to Alaska” is one of John Wayne’s better comedies and definitely one of Johnny Horton’s best songs,
…but I’m sure Savrienna was too busy listening to “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” and Madonna to encounter any of that. (Johnny Cash, John Denver, Jethro Tull, the Bee Gees, Tammy Wynette…lots of recording artists sang about Alaska.)
Next to Savrienna herself, I suppose next in line to blame for her inflicting her ignorance on the world would be whoever or whatever raised her without getting across the basic life competence skill of constantly seeking out information about the world around you and finding friends and associates who aren’t stoned most of the time, like, unfortunately, a lot of the population of Alaska.
The only things I’m curious about regarding Savrienna are 1) how many people like her live in the U.S. and 2) how do we get them to move to Canada?
Ethics Alarms 
First, we have to conclude that American children are very fortunate she moved to Canada because she could have easily become a teacher in America.
I decided in the 1990s to homeschool my children because far too many teachers I was coming into contact with were just out of college and they were just like this young woman. Homeschooling in California was not legal, but I valued my children far too much to subject them to government-run education.
Because they received a real education my children grew up to be a doctor, dentist, career Marine, career chef, and contractor.
A public school education would have subjected society more of what she has become.
I’m inclined to think, or at least hope, that this girl (and a lot of other tiktok idiots), isn’t really this dumb, but merely a performance artist playing an idiot for clicks. Seriously, 18 years of never looking at a globe or world map? The people I know in real life that approach this level of ignorance tend to have severe learning disabilities, and I don’t think she has one.
I have a hard time believing that was the map used in 8th grade. Every school I attended in two different school systems had a Mercator projection map on the room. You don’t even need a globe to see the layout of all the continents.
I don’t fathom why anyone believes that all learning must originate in a school. I will say that I don’t see teachers encouraging intellectual curiosity. Far too many are simply teaching to the test. And, in fairness to teachers many parents have abdicated their role in instilling such curiosity in their own children. I suppose they are consumed by making Tik Tok videos to get attention.
To show that it isn’t just her, but “a U.S. thing”, she uses some other TikTok person and her uncle’s ignorance as examples. That just confirms what I think about TikTok and what I suspect about her family. (I feel kind of bad saying that, it’s also possible that her uncle has useful knowledge – like some trade. Sure, it would be nice if he knew geography too, but if he can fix my car and do it right, I’d probably value that more.)
She’s young enough that if there was absolutely anything in the world that she was curious about, she could have looked it up online. No need to hike down to the neighborhood library and hope the book you want is there. Just tap some keys, and boom, a new rabbit hole to follow. (Or, at least that’s my experience.) Our schools aren’t great, but she needs to move on from expecting to be fed knowledge to seeking it on her own.
Not halfway through her rant, and before I reached Jack’s recitation of Edward Gory’s limerick, “I” was ready to bash in her teeth to shut her up.
As a Canadian, I take exception to you wanting to foist your geographically (and probably every other [fill in the blank}graphy and [fill in the blank]ology) ignorant airheads onto us Canucks. We have Trudeau. Haven’t we suffered enough?
I went to school in Canada, and I can assure you that at no point did they sit me down and say “look, Alaska is over here note that it is not an island.” They certainly didn’t teach me what part of Great Britain was Wales, or where to find the Dardanelles, or where on earth is Zanzibar. These are things that you “pick up along the way” by reading, and studying maps. A curious mind runs into references to places while reading the news, or reading novels, or even watching movies, and looks such things up because they’re not content not to know. An incurious mind, it seems, just assumes God made Alaska ‘s Eastern shoreline with a straightedge, and doesn’t think it at all remarkable.
If she concluded Alaska was an island by that map inset, I guess she also thought Texas is bigger than Alaska. I should comment on her video and let her know Alaska is almost 2.5 times larger than Texas. Maybe she’ll do another video.
There are a lot of people like her. My freshman this year probably learned more history in their 1 semester science class than they did in all their years of public schooling. This year, like last year, the only people who knew anything about WWI were the homeschooled ones. They didn’t know anything about the Civil War, the 19th century, nothing. They recognized Edison and Einstein, but didn’t know what they did. They probably could have listed 30 genders, however.
If my jigsaw puzzle taught me anything growing up, of course Alaska is an island….
The island of Hawaii is just south of Texas, and Alaska’s a bit to the east, roughly south of Alabama, if I recall correctly!
(The Rio Grande must be 100’s of miles wide if Hawaii can fit south of Texas – do immigrants from Mexico swim to Hawaii first…. 🤔)
Jack asked, “What Do You Conclude From This Woman’s Head-Exploding Rant?”
Possibility A: She’s a moron with no filter.
Possibility B: She is intentionally presenting herself as a moron with no filter and laughing all the way to the bank.
Possibility C: Some combination of A & B.
After seeing the patterns of what morons with no filters do on the internet over the past 15 years or so, I think what’s most likely is that she’s a moron, she doesn’t know she’s a moron and she thinks it’s a great idea to show everyone that she’s a moron so she can get some kind of self gratification “likes” to boost her ego.
Oh, the last description is spot on. She has developed a presentation style of some skill, and is brodacasting stupidity in a way that will make others stupid too. I find myself wondering what other misinformation has settled in her skull. Does she think the moon is the size of a half-dollar? Does she think the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
HA! That’s a great place for an Animal House quote!
I think the following was from a Monty Python skit (paraphrasing as best I can remember): “Was Magna Carta for naught? Did that brave Hungarian peasant girl die in vain?”
Wait. The Germans didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor? Huh.
jvb
I think she warrants a great Mike Myers Moosehead burp and a “Take off, hoser.” Eh?
I think she’s playing a pretty common expat game: Endear yourself with your host country by mocking people from your home country. My college roommate started his long, successful career in the U.K. writing plays that mock Americans. And he’s continued doing so for decades.
Her video typifies what we see every day. Many high school students follow this mentality of “I wasn’t taught this” placing the onus on the educational system. And while this has merit, it isn’t the only problem.
I am the first to admit that there are serious problems with public education, including teaching content needed only to satisfy a test or a credit of some type. This leads to, in Ohio for example, all graduates must have at least an Algebra 2 math credit. How many of our students achieve this is a mystery considering the number of the students that I have that cannot perform basic four-function math, figure simple percentages (10% off for example), work with fractions or decimals. Their science and language arts skills are often even worse.
Our system does not encourage intellectual curiosity. To really learn something, it requires having an interest in the subject. Too few high school students have any interest in doing more than is required to pass a class.
Not many parents actually parent anymore or take much notice of what their children are doing in school, so you end up with rooms filled with free-range kids doing whatever they feel like, which is often watching and/or making tik-tok videos. If you try to enforce some behavior standards, our warm and fuzzy culture places the burden on the staff to make the student feel good about behaving properly, i.e., reward them for showing up on time instead of correcting unacceptable behaviors.
Education should be about providing waypoints of knowledge, leading a person to question, explore, and to fill in the gaps and find answers along the way. Instead, we have a system of day care providers, dribbling out pieces of information to disinterested and unattached “learners.” As long as the public is apathetic and the teachers’ unions have influence, things will remain as they are. Expecting our modern youth culture to recognize the problems and do their part to correct things is probably asking a little too much.