In response to "It is not the purpose of the State Department website to educate people about the US", you reply,
Then why bother having it?
Because the original post starts off with the improbable straw man, Where's one of the best places to learn about the United States?, and then preposterously offers up the State Department's Web site!
No, no, no. If I want to go to one of the best places to learn about the United States, I'd go to www.usa.gov. Why would I go to the government's foreign policy site for that information? That would be akin to searching for the Yankees on Broadway because you'd once heard of the play, "Damn Yankees". You may learn a little something about the Yankees there, but really nothing much that will help you.
If you're looking for sites that contain information about this country, look for sites that deal with this country, not how it interfaces with and relates to other countries.
Are you a product of the public school system or something? You've (and the original poster, jenward) already amply demonstrated that logic and clear thinking are not part of your repertoire.
The Left doesn't even have to do anything but laugh when threads like this pop up!
CA....
In response to "It is not the purpose of the State Department website to educate people about the US", you reply, Then why bother having it?
I was pointing out to the respondee, who claims to be a State Department employee, the silliness of his remark that the purpose of the State Department's web site was not to educate people about the US. Think about it for a moment. If the web site isn't intended to educate people about the US then why does it have huge amounts of content to do just that? Why does it explain how the State Department works, who its leaders are, how to get a visa to the United States, how to find travel information about the United States, and so on? What would be the point of the United States government having a web site which didn't convey information about our country?
If you look around the State Department web site you will see that it in fact is designed to teach people about our country -- including among other things the names of our ambassadors around the world, and the locations of our embassies. Adding a few kbytes of content to lead visitors, many foreign, to more information about our country seems like a pretty reasonable enhancement to me.
My comments are only peripherally related to the original posting -- I suggested a solution for the kind of perception the original post implies -- namely just making a simple page in the set of country pages that points to exactly the same kind of informative web sites you cited. I don't see why suggesting an enhancement to the State Department web site to avoid the kind of mis-perception evidenced by some of the other posts is so radical an idea.