Essay Undergraduate 523 words

American Values Examined: Kohls's Framework and Its Limits

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Abstract

This paper offers a critical engagement with Robert Kohls's essay "The Values Americans Live By," affirming his core argument that most Americans are unconscious of the cultural values shaping their worldviews. The paper explores Kohls's treatment of self-reliance, independence, and future-orientation, agreeing that these values stem from myths of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. It challenges Kohls's claim that future-orientation explains why Americans do not help strangers with directions, arguing instead that Americans often act without regard for long-term consequences. The paper further contends that beyond Kohls's framework, more troubling values — including the celebration of ignorance, consumerism, religious conservatism's hypocrisies, and permissive attitudes toward gun ownership — have become embedded in American cultural identity.

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What makes this paper effective

The paper demonstrates critical engagement by both affirming and challenging Kohls's argument rather than simply summarizing it, showing the writer's ability to think independently about source material.
Concrete examples — such as American debt, celebrity culture, and consumerism — are used to ground abstract value claims in observable social phenomena.
The paper moves logically from agreement to qualified disagreement, maintaining a coherent argumentative thread throughout a short essay format.

Key academic technique demonstrated

The paper models critical response writing: it first establishes agreement with a source, then identifies specific claims within that source that require qualification or extension. This two-step move — validate, then complicate — is a foundational technique in academic literary and cultural analysis. The writer avoids both uncritical acceptance and wholesale rejection of Kohls's framework.

Structure breakdown

The paper is organized as a two-paragraph response essay. The first paragraph engages Kohls's core claims about self-reliance and independence, affirming them through historical and cultural context. The second paragraph pivots to challenge one specific claim (future-orientation) while extending Kohls's framework to include more troubling cultural values the original essay does not address. The structure mirrors a compare-and-extend model well-suited to response assignments.

Introduction: Americans and Their Unexamined Values

According to Robert Kohls, most Americans are unaware of the values that shape their worldviews. This assessment, put forward in "The Values Americans Live By," is entirely persuasive. Americans are deeply concerned with values such as self-reliance and independence, and these concerns extend from the myths of American exceptionalism and concepts like Manifest Destiny. One of Kohls's central goals is to show readers why some foreigners seem perplexed by American culture and the apparent contradictions within it.

Self-Reliance, Independence, and the Myth of the American Frontier

Americans have been taught to celebrate the pioneers of the Wild West and the cowboy culture that accompanies it. As a result, collaboration and cooperation take a back seat to values like self-help and individual achievement. Kohls illustrates this dynamic with a telling example: in many other cultures, a person asking for directions will often find that someone walks with them until they find what they are seeking. This is not true of every culture, but it is true of many. Americans, by contrast, tend to provide quick verbal directions and move on — a reflection of their fierce individualism.

2 Locked Sections · 205 words remaining

Future-Orientation and Its Contradictions · 110 words

"Kohls's future-orientation claim challenged with evidence"

Darker Values Beneath the Surface of American Culture · 95 words

"Ignorance, consumerism, and permissiveness as cultural values"

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Conclusion: The Hidden Costs of Extreme Self-Reliance

While Kohls's framework captures much of what defines American cultural identity, it stops short of addressing some of its more troubling dimensions. Values like extreme self-reliance ultimately obscure the unavoidable human need for cooperation and acceptance. A fuller account of American values must grapple not only with independence and frontier mythology, but also with the ways in which those myths have enabled less admirable traits to flourish alongside them.

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Key Concepts in This Paper

American Values Self-Reliance American Exceptionalism Manifest Destiny Future-Orientation Consumerism Cultural Identity Cowboy Culture Religious Conservatism Collective Cooperation