As I believe I’ve mentioned on the boards before, I had a Spanish ex-girlfriend who for a brief period adamently maintained that Columbus’s contemporaries thought the Earth was flat, in the face of my objections, on the basis that that was what she’d been told at school. She did eventually accept my counter-arguments. (In fairness, I suspect that I was taught the same myth at school in Scotland, though I’d long since obliterated this belief before I’d met her.)
Though, and I believe I’ve tied the following anecdote to the latter on on the SDMB before, she did separately call me on the question of whether Normans=Vikings, with my defense similarly being that that was what I was taught at school. A subsequent reading of R.H.C. Davis’s The Normans and Their Myths confirmed that, at the very least, I’d been rather too trusting of my teachers.
That putting Native Americans (indians) on reservations was good for them.
That Mercury was benign and fun to play with. By default, I was taught that you couldn’t get hurt in science lab, so the only protection necessary was a smock to cover your clothing.
We were taught that Bernoulli’s principle was the main reason that airplanes fly. Almost everyone was taught this and they still teach it. What a mysterious and misleading thing to teach. Bernoulli’s principle is a minor contributor to lift but the biggest factor is angle of attack (air deflection) like six year olds figure out on their own by sticking their hand out of moving car. Teachers come up with all kinds of crazy stuff when some reasonably bright student asks how planes can fly upside down if bernoulli’s principle is the cause of lift.
The real explanation would be so much easier to teach.
When the first grade teacher said with a loving smile while explaining the grading system, “And don’t worry if you don’t get As or Bs, we’re all equal … the main thing is that we try our best.”
What she did was lie.
Some people have difficulty learning, myself included, and as we all come to learn, people that don’t do so well in school are looked down on and end up with low quality lives and basically being societies niggers … while all those brainy little Johnnies get to be the bigshot doctors and lawyers and such, being validated 24/7.
If first grade teachers were honest, they’d take their students out on a field trip the first day of school and let them see the dregs of society and tell the little tykes that dummies in school end up like them.
Of course you’d get a lot of little kids throwing themselves off the monkey bars … but at least they wouldn’t have to endure a lifetime of pain and hatred by foolhardily going forward with the crap others demand of them, only to learn that all men are not created equal, and that love is absolutely conditional.
Graham-
If you need to talk, I’m here for ya, buddy.
But seriously, I agree that this is one of the most harmful things a kid could be taught. Sometimes your best just isn’t good enough and you need to try harder; make you best a little better.
I heard a lot of the same bs that previous posters mentioned, BUT I graduated before the internet really caught on. Way back in the 1980s, we’d hear some wacky news story on the radio and go around repeating it like it was carved in stone. What a bunch of kooks.
My brother’s 5th grade teacher taught the class that there are 52 U.S. states. She believed that there had been 50 before they added Alaska and Hawaii and that most people who thought there were 50 were just forgetting about those two states. My brother asked her to count the stars on the flag. She said there would be 52. They counted. Wrong, Mrs. McKee!
This explained why she didn’t last a second year at our school. She reportedly went all around the district, spending only one or to years at a number of schools. I hope she’s retired by now. Stupid, stupid woman.
I had a teacher for third grade who couldn’t read. I corrected her several times, but she always told me she was right. She would insert letters that didn’t belong into words and had little grasp of phonics for figuring out how to say proper names. She prounouced a certain famous book “The Genius Book of World Records.”
I read the anecdote in Exploring the New World. Unfortunately, my copy’s at my parents’ house in Ohio – otherwise, I could quote the passage.
The best summary of Columbus’s accomplishment I’ve heard is that “once he discovered America, it stayed discovered.” Other than the eleventh-century Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadowson the island of Newfoundland, however, no pre-Columbian landfall of Europeans in the Americas is accepted as conclusively proven fact by the general community of historians.
One of my college professors informed us that we weren’t studying Gilgamesh, because it was older than the Bible, and nothing is older than the Bible. So therefore Gilgamesh didn’t exist. She also said Socrates was a Christian, despite him living quite some time before Jesus was even born.
Another college professor said Alexander the Great died of an arrow wound. Not so! He died of an illness, possibly malaria. She also said Alexander’s only child was a girl, which isn’t true either – his posthumous son was also named Alexander, and was killed by Cassander when he was in his early teens.
In the late '50s, in the aftermath of Sputnik, we were taught that the Russians would land a man on the moon within a few years, but there would never be an American in space.
Every time our teacher graded our tests, she would draw a little Sputnik at the top if you got a high score. A low score got you a little Vanguard rocket.
We were also taught, by omission, that blacks have contributed very little to society, and that gay people don’t exist.
I was told in Kindergarten that American’s don’t go to war anymore.
This was 1972, when we were still involved in Vietnam.
I was actually taught of Columbus not being the first to discover America back in 2nd grade. But it wasn’t exactly the correct curriculum. You see, one of the other kids asked the teacher, “Everyone always says that Columbus discovered America, but my brother says the vikings did”. the teacher went on to explain that the vikings probably did reach America first. However, she was supposed to teach that Columbus did.
As for the 52 states, I once started a thread asking why this was such a common beleif, the general answer was because many schools teach it that way.
Sad really.
i was also taught that about glass flowing, by a geology teacher no less.
