Lies you were taught in school

[caninepawprints]

1. Thomas Edison/Nikola Tesla invented the lightbulb. (Incandescent light bulbs were being played with by 22 other inventors, and Edison bought the patent for it from Heinrich Goebel's widow.)
2. Christopher Columbus discovered America. (He was one of the last explorers to reach America; not counting the natives already here, Leif Eriksson was the first.)
3. Abraham Lincoln was strongly against slavery. (Only in the Confederate states; if he could save the Union without freeing slaves, he said he'd do it.)
4. Humans evolved from chimpanzees. (We share a common ancestor, but it actually formed two separate lineages.)
5. There's no gravity in space. (There is and it's significantly weaker than what we experience on Earth; it keeps the moon in place and objects that seem to defy gravity are actually in a free fall.)
6. There were 13 original colonies. (There were only 12 - Delaware was a part of Pennsylvania.)
7. Everything about Thanksgiving. (The only thing pilgrims shared with the natives was disease.)
8. The founding fathers were all Christian men. (Only two were Christian: Alexander Hamilton, and that was only after his son was killed, and John Adams, who was Unitarian. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were both deists. George Washington followed pantheism.)

And the BIGGEST lie?

You can be anything you want to be.

[Dug]

That cursive writing would be required on all your papers past whatever year you learned it. I've probably used cursive a handful of times in my life not counting my signature (and even then its chicken scratch basically)

[SupBrah]

"You won't be able to carry a calculator in your pocket 24/7 when you're an adult"

You were saying, Mrs. Wilson?

[Rowarx]

Video game design. Diversity became a mandatory lesson and we were constantly told not to have white men as the protagonists of our games.

jesus christ thats awful

[ellieg]

"Everybody is equal"

[TITAN308]

Women have vaginas and Men have penises.

lmao

/thread

[Weltall84]

I was told in my health class in 4th grade that if we didn't pop our pimples that they would go into our blood stream, cause a blood clot, and ultimately kill us.

[Wuuzikli]

Growing up fast, taking friendships for granted, fake love, teachers teaching math with compassion.

[Molis]

You need to know how to multiply and divide fractions.

Also long division.

[Dug]

I was told in my health class in 4th grade that if we didn't pop our pimples that they would go into our blood stream, cause a blood clot, and ultimately kill us.

The fuck haha

I was told not to pop them or they'd leave permanent scars

[Queen of Hamsters]

- "You will need to know all of these things for your adult life!"
- "You're lazy and difficult"
- "Teachers are always interested in what's best for their students"
- "Evolution is just a theory" (Religion teacher, obviously)
- "All humans are the same deep down inside!" (Response from a teacher when my mom brought up a particularly horrific bullying session aimed at me)
- A lot of what they taught us about the US.

Yeah...

[Machismo]

I was taught many complete falsehoods, mostly about American and world history. Our founding fathers were not the altruistic beacons of freedom we were led to believe. My country perpetrated a great many atrocities on millions of people. The Pledge of Allegiance is not mandatory, after all. We allied with some pretty terrible people in WW2. We are not the most free nation on the planet.

[Powerogue]

Cursive would be a useful thing.

I still sign in cursive out of habit, but I write so little now compared to keyboards I'm barely literate in manuscript anymore.

I'll add that all of what I learned in math except for a basic understanding of the four operations, decimals and fractions (so what, 4th grade?) has been worthless. I read back through my childhood notes and can't understand a word of it.

As far as history it was mostly what they left out. Mainly anything that made us look like less than a beacon of flawless christianity and saviors of planet earth. Remember that time Missouri declared war on the mormons for being heretics? I sure didn't!

[Pull My Finger]

Women have vaginas and Men have penises.

Haha, /thread

[Toogoodman]

Women have vaginas and Men have penises.

How cis of oyu

[zealo]

That people used to believe the world was flat for far longer than actually were the case, e.g into the middle ages. Even in antiquity they knew of the spherical shape, and that didn't really change going forward. It's a modern invented myth.

This still appears in text books well into the 21th century despite having been refuted for a long time.

[TheWorkingTitle]

Gosh, where to begin. Basically all of the liberal brainwash, such as:

-Global Warming
-Evolution
-That the Founding Fathers weren't the greatest men to ever walk this Earth
-That the plaque on the Statue of Liberty was there from the beginning
-Teachers deserve more pay and that we should support their annual strikes
-Everyone being equal
-Peace through appeasement and not Power
-All the other US History bashing, acting like the US isn't the greatest country to ever exist
-etc. etc.

[zealo]

The whole Columbus discovering America thing comes to mind...

Well, that discovery was what prompted the age of colonialism properly, at least.

There are records of German scholars being aware of the Norse discovery of land far west by the Norse as early as the 12th century iirc, but it was believed it was mostly some frigid Arctic islands rather than a massive continent, at the time.

[Toogoodman]

That jesus was real.

Pretty sure he was a real person, the son of god thooooooooooooooooooooo..... idk, guess ill find out eventually.

[Powerogue]

That you should brush your teeth after every meal.

As someone now up to 3 cavities due to trying to get away with only brushing once a day that one's actually pretty accurate. Though it depends on your diet.

That people used to believe the world was flat for far longer than actually were the case, e.g into the middle ages. Even in antiquity they knew of the spherical shape, and that didn't really change going forward. It's a modern invented myth.

This still appears in text books well into the 21st century despite having been refuted for a long time.

Considering there are people that believe it's flat right here and now in this forum (plural? I only know of Hammerfest as one that's serious but it sounds like there's at least one more from other posts on this thread) it's more likely than you think. Willful ignorance is a powerful thing. I mean hell, Origin of Species was published in 1859 and there's still somewhere between 40-50% of the US that believes that's total bupkis.