QUOTE
I feel one can't learn anything from anime. If you want to learn about politics watch the news, read the paper/book or even find about a parties policies. Using anime for such things is a poor substitute. The situations used in most series are often unrealistic or simplified to make the villains more obvious. It also fails to tackle many issues in sufficient depth as the story moves on to the next arc. As for family/relationship problems I find one learns more from real life situations, in many anime series they have personalities that would seem unreal and like the previous example many of the scenario placed seem too outlandish to have applicable applications in real life. As for about learning morals...
Some would say that if someone needs animes to learn about friendship, he should watch less animes and go out more often.
Anyway, I'd like to add to your point that it's not specific to animes.
Watching Armageddon (The movie with Bruce Willis) won't teach you anything about astronomy, watching 24 won't teach you anything about counter-terrorism, Beverly Hills 90210 won't teach you about the typical life of teenagers.
Even watching some specialized animes, like Hikaru no Go, won't teach you a lot about go (it will teach you maybe some basis, the kind of things you discover during the first hour).
Mainly because they are not here to teach something. They're here to entertain, to tell a story, sometimes to create some feelings, sometimes to challenge the watcher.
QUOTE Also for the younger people out there don't develop a siege mentally where you think
"its us against them" saying things like adults are stupid have closed minds and don't know anything. Just keep in mind there are ALOT of adults out using these blanket expressions is a gross misjudgement. It would be equivalent to me saying all children can't short attention spans or they all hate books as they are boring. Keep a open mind and avoid making big generalisations or blanket expressions e.g all adults hate anime.
A good comparaison to people confusing animes and cartoons (which is not surprising, since the borders are very blurry, if they exists at all) would be people calling Bach, Mozart and Berlioz 'classical music'.
No!
Bach is baroque, Mozart is classical and Berlioz is romantic. And yet, a lot of people would make the confusion.
By the way, there's also a lot of young people who don't care about the alleged fundamental difference between animes and cartoons. Of course, they don't go on anime-related website, so there's less chance to encounter them.