Did anyone here at SDMB had a similar experience? I went to elementary school in a small but not tiny town in Arkansas in the 1960s. We were taught that Alan Shepard was the first man in space. Our text books supported this but they might have said American instead of man. I don’t remember. We learned about the Soviet (we would have said Russian) Sputnik and the dog but no one or no book ever mentioned Yuri Gagarin’s famous flight. This omission was never corrected in junior high school or high school. It was only because my mother bought a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in about 1970 that I learned the Soviets were the first to put a man in space. Please note that this was the same public school system that taught us as a fact in science class that girls have more ribs than boys because God took a rib from Adam to make Eve.
I had a science teacher who was quite convinced (and tried to persuade us) that all the Soviet early videos of spacewalks were all faked in a swimming pool or some such.
But Gagarin was unavoidable, the USSR’s best propaganda in quite a while.
I just did some searching to see if there is any mention of such textbooks online. I couldn’t find anything. Since this class was almost sixty years ago, I wonder if you’re remembering what the book said and what your teacher said correctly. Perhaps the book said that Alan Shepard was the first American and Yuri Gagarin was the first Russian, but you had no idea how to pronounce Yuri Gagarin, so you forgot it. Both of those space flights were a big thing in American news sources then, so it’s hard to believe any adult didn’t know about both of them.
It’s hard to believe that a science textbook at any level taught that women have more ribs than men. It’s possible that a teacher said this. They could be rather poor at science knowledge and yet teaching science in a bad public school. Do you have any memory of what these textbooks were?
That’s just what the teacher said, it wasn’t in any textbook. But it was in the Bible so it must be true.
Also, I am certain that there was never any mention of Gagarin in school. I definitely remember being shocked when I read about Gagarin in the encyclopedia.
But it’s not hard to believe that my teachers never told us about both of them.
If your teachers told you that women have more ribs than men and didn’t mention Gagarin, you went to a terrible school.
I went to a public school where there were about 75 students at each grade level. Most of the fathers of the students were farmers or factory workers or both. Most of the people teaching or studying at the school considered you to be doing very well if you got accepted at a third-rate college. Your school was terrible even compared to my school.
I don’t remember a time that I didn’t know who Gagarin was. I’m also not going to presume that I remember exactly what my teacher told me 40-50 years ago.
It wasn’t in my elementary school texts, but the flight happened as I was finishing 4th grade so not surprising. It was all over the news, though. Unless the OP went to elementary school in the very late 60s, I’m surprised the texts were new enough to include anything about it.
A terrible school in Arkansas? No way!
I learned about Gargarin in school (I assume - I can’t quite imagine where I would have learned it otherwise). I did have a teacher who thought that AD stood for “After Death” (and thus that there were 30-some unnumbered years), but he had the grace to accept the dictionary as evidence he was wrong. Another teacher told us that sound can be as loud as 20,000 dB and have a frequency of up to 200 hz (non-science teacher teaching science, poorly).
You’re lucky though. Asimov noted in one of his books that the first nuclear power plant was built in the Soviet Union, and a reader reported him to the FBI
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…Our text books … [/quote]
Just to clarify, our hard bound text books at the time were really old, probably older than I was at the time. Any books about space exploration came in the form of soft bound texts in a format similar to comic books.
As a Brit I was always taught that the first one was Calder Hall in Cumbria. Checking wikipedia now, it seems that Calder Hall was the first “full scale” commercial reactor. The Soviet one went live a couple of years earlier, but was small scale and really just an experiment. (Both of them really just produced electricity as a by product of plutonium manufacture.) National pride dented slightly, but no need to inform the FBI.
I went to Catholic schools from K through 12. (1958 through 1971) The Nuns taught us this as fact.
If they told you that men have one more rib than Gargarin and didn’t mention women, you went to a very strange school indeed
It wasn’t just Arkansas schools that missed the mark.
The education of children has always been filled with uninspired, lazy, misinformed, drug addled, just-don’t-give-a-crap educators well past their usefulness.
Not all, of course. But too many.
It behooves a parent to add out-of-school experiences, be involved, ask questions.
This doesn’t happen enough.
There are parents who consider school a warehouse to store the kid so they can do other things.
And, yet we wonder why kids are like they are.
It sickens me what public school has become.
I say this having raised my children thru it, having 6 grandkids all involved in it.
Knowing that most of their class work is taught on a screen. Most reading is done in the once a week library time. All homework is only done correctly because a parent teaches the child how. They just don’t know the information.
It needs major reformation. Throwing money at the problem doesn’t help when the local school board wants a new stadium for the football program.
It really is a huge problem. We can’t compete in the world with several generations of poorly educated children.
I learned of the space program from the public library and 2 books my brother had.
Can you give some examples?
I went to school in Arkansas. I don’t remember being taught the names, but I definitely knew the USSR made it to space first, which is why we pushed so hard to be the ones making it to the moon first.
But I also went to a private school for the first few years of my life because my mom got a huge deal by working there. I knew how to do square roots by hand by the end of fourth grade. So I don’t know how typical it was.
I do remember hearing the thing about the ribs, but I don’t think I learned it in school. But I also remember assuming that Adam had an odd number of ribs, unlike us now. So I never thought Eve had more ribs.