The United States was founded on principles of liberty and equality for all.
While I was taught that in elementary school, I was also taught about the 3/5ths compromise as early as middle school. By the time high school rolled around I was being taught about reconstruction and the corrupt bargain of 1877. I guess I’m lucky I got a good education in the north because I am aware that’s not necessarily the standard nationally.
My AP history teacher gave us copies of Zinn's A People's History of the United States as a supplemental to our textbooks. She was an awful teacher overall, but I appreciated her trying to make sure we had multiple perspectives.
Then I went to an elite east-coast private college, where I almost failed US History because I called the professor out for teaching Lost Cause bullshit.
Any academic peddling lost cause bullshit is a complete joke. Just curious, were they from the south?
Of course they were.
He also characterized the 2000 election as "a perfect tie" that could've just as easily been decided by a coinflip instead of the more historically agreed upon view of the Supreme Court ratfucking Florida's recount.
Technically, it was founded on the principles of liberty and equality for all. Just not the practices of liberty and equality for all. it was an aspiration, a goal of our forefathers.
But the way they teach it in school is pretty deceptive— as if it was all accomplished magically on that day in 1776, when, even today, it’s a constant struggle— a goal that we’re much closer to, but still remains elusive. that’s the part they don’t teach.
I remember in school learning about the different areas of the tongue tasting different things, and then we had an experiment to try it, and everyone was like "wow it works!" but I told the teacher it didn't work for me, and I got told I was doing it wrong =w=
Anywho, the entire thing about different tastes being localized to different areas is bullshit, so that's 1 point to me and 0 to the teacher
My daughter and I did this for one of her science projects. I would drop lemon juice or sugar water somewhere on her tongue, and she was able to taste everything everywhere.
It was so long ago I don't remember, but I hope we got a good grade on that one!
Same experiment I had lol. Had to pat down our tongues with a paper towel and then put sugar/lemon/pepper and whatever else on it :3 and yeah, I very much could taste everything everywhere haha
30 years ago, it was still taught that we Belgians went to the Congo out of benevolence, to help lift up the people there. Not one mention of rubber quota or chopped off hands. Fuck that indoctrination.
It wasn't even "the Belgians." It was the king that owned the place, if I remember right.
France: the French revolution was poor people rioting. We are starting to accept that it was rich people killing each other to replace monarchy, and using poor people as a side-effect, kind of like... what we have right now, what a coincidence!
It was "self-made" rich people (bourgeoisie) vs "birthright" rich people (nobility). We still got some cool side-effects though. Some of those bourgeois legitimately kick started what we call left and progressive politics today (Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat).
A lot of the early (1789) revolutionaries were from the nobility and even the clergy. Many of the reactionaries were up and coming bourgeois who were about to make their way into the nobility. Sorry Marx, you got a few things right, but that one was an oversimplification.
The vast majority of the victims of the reign of terror were commoners. The nobility were underrepresented at the guillotine, besides a few obvious high-profile cases.
It appears as though Robespierre legitimately lost his mind at some point. He attempted to introduce a “cult of the supreme being” with himself as high priest that focused on adhering to his own idea of virtue. Anyone not virtuous enough, which was effectively literally everyone else, was liable to be executed.
Early in the revolutionary wars, the revolutionaries had arrested so many people that the Paris jails were super overcrowded. Some people didn’t want the armies to leave Paris for the front lines because maybe all those jailed people would break out and cause trouble. So Marat proposed that they reduce the incarcerated population… by killing them all. September 1789 was a bad month to have been a petty thief in Paris.
So many of the popular notions about the revolution are distorted or just ass-backwards.
Working hard will get you rewarded. When really you get dunked on with more work.
This one for me too, hard work gets you nowhere without knowing people or ingratiating oneself and I am missing that gene
Checks and balances in the US government. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Constitutional rights being unassailable.
All these are lies. I think it can be fixed, but it won't be easy.
That's less a lie and more 'teaching the ideal.' The problem isn't learning how the system is supposed to work. That's how you learn to be a mechanic. You learn how an engine is supposed to work so you can spot where it's gone wrong. The issue is more one of there are millions of people and they get 10 minutes on how it's supposed to work and then only 3 of them go into politics and learn how it actually works/doesn't work. Democracy requires more than a one week chapter on civics, once a year. We all have to be mechanics, or at least be prepared to try.
That homework isn’t discriminatory. Not all kids have lives that allow them to do it. If you can’t cover all the bases in whole ass 8 hours I’m there a day that’s on you, not me. This is only true k - 12, college level courses are voluntary so having some homework could be considered ok.
You do have a valid argument. There are lots of children that don't have an environment that allows them to do homework or study.
I don't think this means we should get rid of homework. Homework is essentially practicing what was learned in the classroom. Learning is a constant process, it doesn't automatically happen after being exposed to a topic during the course of an 8 hour day. Learning anything requires practice. (The neurons that fire together wire together.)
If little Billy did the homework and got a bunch of stuff wrong, that helps the teacher identify and diagnose the skill issue, (in theory.) If little Billy didn't do his homework at all, the teacher has no idea Billy could be struggling to learn the material until after he has been tested. It's a tool to help students practice, and a tool to help teachers assess and diagnose. It shouldn't be used as part of the rubric that determines what a child's grade for the material is at the end of the term.
My grandmother was a school teacher. She was very clear about homework: kids should not have any. Kids are kids, they simply are not designed to sit still and work on school work all day.
She expected there to be learning time, play time, sports or activity time, family time, and bed time. There is something useful to be learned in all phases of a persons day, its just different.
If a child was struggling, she would stay after school and work with them, or spend more time during the day with them. At worst they may have to finish up something assigned in class they didnt finish in time, but thats it.
But this assigning homework for homeworks sake, she really did not like that idea at all.
She knew if Little Billy didnt know what was going on, not due to homework, but due to classwork and interaction at school.
Lies of omission count? I was in my 40s before I ever heard of the Tulsa Massacre.
Same! And I grew up in the Midwest/south. I first heard of it from the show The Watchmen and really thought it was part of the fictional narrative until I got curious and looked it up. Terrible, and also terrible that it stayed so hidden.
Listening to authority with no critical thinking will make your life easier.
They still teach the bullshit Thanksgiving story in most schools in the US.
Pictures of the civil rights movement are in black and white even though color photography existed for decades. They're only in black and white to make kids think it was longer ago than it was.
What they teach: humans only have five senses (touch, smell, etc) What is true: humans have ~20-30 senses (including time, balance, and many more)
5 senses
4 states of matter
fossil fuel (oil is made from dead dinosaurs)
the American Dream
China is evil
Communism is bad
That Europeans discovered the 'new world', and that it was inhabited by 'savages' aka people with forgettable cultures, skills, and lifestyles.
Drugs are bad.
More specifically that all drugs are the same type and intensity of bad.
I remember that when I was getting this “lesson“, my first question was “what about medication’s?“ And my teacher replied with “those aren’t drugs“
And I replied “then why do they call it the drugstore?” then my teacher sent me to the principal’s office for being “smart“. I didn’t understand what was wrong with being “smart“.
Yeah, I've had that same discussion even as an adult. It usually follows like this:
"No, I mean addictive drugs"
"Like tobacco?"
"No, I mean psychoactive drugs"
"Like Coffee?"
"No, recreational drugs"
"Like Alcohol?"
I have never had someone give a description of why weed should be illegal but not tobacco.
The people who fought at the Alamo were heroes.
In Germany, a lot of the times it's taught that we barely did colonialism. Like, "colonialism was bad but it was mostly other countries". Meanwhile, in reality, German colonialism saw the first mayor genocide of the 21st century.
Kind of related, but in fifth grade, on the first day of school, my teacher told us that our most important homework every day was to play and have fun, which gave me a lot of hope for the year.
But then it turns out that he assigned a lot of homework, and I felt like I never got to do the homework #1 of play and have fun. It seemed like he had lied to us about which homework was the most important because it didn't affect our grade whether or not we played after school, but if we didn't do homework, not only did it affect our grade, it also meant we got taken out of recess.
Asshole was trying to teach you “how the real world works” by touting self care as paramount and then assigning seemingly higher value tasks to test your penchant for a good “work-life balance”. I’d feel betrayed too!
When I was in school, they taught us the Tongue Map
For the uninitiated: the theory is that only certain sections of the tongue taste certain things, such as sweetness, sourness, bitterness, etc. It's also total bullshit.
I have heard of schools teaching this as a caution against blindly trusting authority. It's easily disprovable with a simple experiment, and we even did that in class. Simple stuff, like placing sugar on different parts of your tongue to see if you can only taste sweets in the sweet zone.
I told my teacher that I didn't taste any difference, it was all the same. She told me I must be wrong because that's not what it says in the book. That itself could have been a lesson about trusting authority, and I think that at the end of the day you could tell your class it was all an experiment. But that never happened and is a pretty heavy thing to lay on a six-year old.
Either way though, it's a valuable lesson in critical thought and blind trust.
That war is the connective tissue of human history, rather than the holes in the tissue.
There is a lot more peaceful trade and cooperation in history than war, but because war is so disruptive and notable it makes the history books.
Pretty much every history class not so subtly points you to the conclusion that the US had racism, it was bad, but we defeated it so people complaining now are just spoiled.
...when I was a kid. That shit is probably way worse now.
That Custer was ambushed and nobody knows who killed him or why.
He broke ranks and took his troops into an ambush. His arrogant opinion of the fighting abilities of the Lakota and his lust for gold made his defeat elementary. But even though he was a deserter Sherman had to defeat the Indians and so he had to make it a tragic thing
Texas History
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