It just listed a bunch of myths and old wive’s tales that no one at the time thought were very credible anyway. Literally all of the “facts” they list were common chain letter/email memes that everyone trotted out at parties to sound smart and hip. Nobody ever believed what DARE told us, we always knew Christopher Columbus was an asshole, and every first aid class I’ve taken recommended against the whole tilt you head back thing.
@ElderWendigo@MiraLazine agree to disagree, a lot of those things I was definitely taught - if not in school then at least by adults who thought it common knowledge. Especially the nosebleeds (I had them all the time as a kid, and the amount of blood I ended up swallowing is… A lot.) and knuckle cracking (my guess - started by teachers annoyed by kids making knuckle-noises during class)
Christopher columbus was definitely taught as an “American hero” up until he wasn’t.
Pretty much all of these examples were pretty often and commonly debunked by all of my teachers, parents, and adult mentors. But that’s exactly why lists like this are garbage, both of our experiences are anecdotal. You just can’t make blanket claims about things like this about entire generations.
Columbus was more a lie of omission than outright falsehood. That item on the list was probably closest to a universal truth taught across the US, as long as you ignore any school with an indigenous student body. But, most of our teaching about any historical figures in grade school is a near obscene over-simplification of the actual people and events.
That’s your problem. You can’t seriously argue that these myths were being taught as fact in school because they weren’t. They’re all myths spread by common idiots through word of mouth. Common public misconception on the facts can and does happen very independently of actual education, as evidenced by antivaccers lately. The only things you could honestly add to a list like this would be some scientific theory that has been definitively disproven or amended. Maybe something like changing training about CPR would qualify also.
But those kinds of things are boring. It’s much spicier to claim that people were taught that Columbus’s contemporaries thought the world was flat even though that was just an over simplified story told to 5 year olds to explain why they got out of school on Columbus Day. Meanwhile anyone that didn’t sleep through trigonometry should learn that Eratosthenes showed the world was round about 1700 years before Columbus. I would believe that there are some lazy educators out there that would teach such myths as fact, but to claim that it was at all universal is silly. The whole premise of “old generations dumb, look what they believed” is just so smug and offensive. I must be getting old.
They were. Most of the history we were taught was nothing more than pro-America propaganda.
Like for example, the true horrors of slavery aren’t actually commonly known, nor is the true extent of the effects of post-Civil War racist policies like redlining. Or that “crimes” like loitering and trespassing are actually holdovers from fucking Jim Crow laws. Or that American Mixed people originated as the rape babies of slaves.
Or even colonization. Did you know the stupid fucking goddamn Belgian government was the root cause of the Rwandan genocide? They purposefully pitted the Hutus and the Tutsis against each other by giving the Tutsis special privileges and land and shit decades beforehand, playing on their flimsy understanding of the cultural order Hutus and Tutsis already had, enraging the Hutus. And the Belgian government never owned up or took responsibility for it. It wasn’t just France. Macron legit did apologize for the French government’s role but Belgium never did.
Who here was taught about how the U.S. overthrew legit governments in South America and replaced them with dictators?
Or that Libya was bombed to hell and back not because their dictator was a dictator but because he wanted to start selling oil in gold and not U.S. dollars?
Who is ever taught the true nature of any of this shit?
It just listed a bunch of myths and old wive’s tales that no one at the time thought were very credible anyway. Literally all of the “facts” they list were common chain letter/email memes that everyone trotted out at parties to sound smart and hip. Nobody ever believed what DARE told us, we always knew Christopher Columbus was an asshole, and every first aid class I’ve taken recommended against the whole tilt you head back thing.
@ElderWendigo @MiraLazine agree to disagree, a lot of those things I was definitely taught - if not in school then at least by adults who thought it common knowledge. Especially the nosebleeds (I had them all the time as a kid, and the amount of blood I ended up swallowing is… A lot.) and knuckle cracking (my guess - started by teachers annoyed by kids making knuckle-noises during class)
Christopher columbus was definitely taught as an “American hero” up until he wasn’t.
Pretty much all of these examples were pretty often and commonly debunked by all of my teachers, parents, and adult mentors. But that’s exactly why lists like this are garbage, both of our experiences are anecdotal. You just can’t make blanket claims about things like this about entire generations.
Columbus was more a lie of omission than outright falsehood. That item on the list was probably closest to a universal truth taught across the US, as long as you ignore any school with an indigenous student body. But, most of our teaching about any historical figures in grade school is a near obscene over-simplification of the actual people and events.
Any suggestions for more widely spread myths? Wanna incorporate more but had trouble finding them as being definitely taught in schools
That’s your problem. You can’t seriously argue that these myths were being taught as fact in school because they weren’t. They’re all myths spread by common idiots through word of mouth. Common public misconception on the facts can and does happen very independently of actual education, as evidenced by antivaccers lately. The only things you could honestly add to a list like this would be some scientific theory that has been definitively disproven or amended. Maybe something like changing training about CPR would qualify also.
But those kinds of things are boring. It’s much spicier to claim that people were taught that Columbus’s contemporaries thought the world was flat even though that was just an over simplified story told to 5 year olds to explain why they got out of school on Columbus Day. Meanwhile anyone that didn’t sleep through trigonometry should learn that Eratosthenes showed the world was round about 1700 years before Columbus. I would believe that there are some lazy educators out there that would teach such myths as fact, but to claim that it was at all universal is silly. The whole premise of “old generations dumb, look what they believed” is just so smug and offensive. I must be getting old.
Well DARE was taught in schools and that program did spread myths about drugs
One of my elementary teachers taught us the taste bud map myth.
They were. Most of the history we were taught was nothing more than pro-America propaganda.
Like for example, the true horrors of slavery aren’t actually commonly known, nor is the true extent of the effects of post-Civil War racist policies like redlining. Or that “crimes” like loitering and trespassing are actually holdovers from fucking Jim Crow laws. Or that American Mixed people originated as the rape babies of slaves.
Or even colonization. Did you know the stupid fucking goddamn Belgian government was the root cause of the Rwandan genocide? They purposefully pitted the Hutus and the Tutsis against each other by giving the Tutsis special privileges and land and shit decades beforehand, playing on their flimsy understanding of the cultural order Hutus and Tutsis already had, enraging the Hutus. And the Belgian government never owned up or took responsibility for it. It wasn’t just France. Macron legit did apologize for the French government’s role but Belgium never did.
Who here was taught about how the U.S. overthrew legit governments in South America and replaced them with dictators?
Or that Libya was bombed to hell and back not because their dictator was a dictator but because he wanted to start selling oil in gold and not U.S. dollars?
Who is ever taught the true nature of any of this shit?