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.
I mean, good luck. The Principle-Agent Problem is a classic of sociology, particularly with respect to business. If you can solve it, there's a Nobel in Economics waiting for you.
Democracy is an attempt at aligning in the interests of the plurality principles with their government agencies. But there's obviously a whole lot of flaws with democracy generally speaking, even before you get into the particulars of the American system.
I do think that the Lockean Social Contract, as the foundation for any governmental system, is a more interesting and more well-thought-out concept to explore than the mythology surrounding the American three-branch system. Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent does an excellent job of breaking down how a public body can be turned against its own interests. Zinn's People's History gives a ton of insight into the underbelly of the American political beast and how people respond to industrial and state oppression. State and Revolution does an excellent job of describing the role of the state in society and how it can best be dismantled.
But the endless debate around whether US Government works as described or intended really loses the forest of social economy for the ideological tent post trees. Fetishization of the US system only contributes to its rot and our own downfall.
Pictures of the civil rights movement are in black in 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.
Color photos were a thing, but they were significantly more expensive than black and white until around the 1970s. They were mostly saved for special occasions.
Plus, news papers didn't really do much full color until the 80s. Before the mid 50s it was basically just the comic pages that had color. It was the launch of USA Today in 82 that popularized the way newspapers use color today.
Photographers capturing events shoot a lot of film, and there was no compelling reason to shoot in color at the time.
It's almost certainly isn't a conspiracy to make students think it happened a long time ago.
still? That's actually really surprising. Not sure if that's more of a whitewash or more of a greenwash. Like maybe the teachers are racist idiots, but maybe they know and just like the tradition and want to give the kids something fun to do that feels good in a dark world. I don't think greenwash is the right term for that, but yeah.
I know a couple teachers that teach younger kids, I'll have to ask what they do.
I don't know what the existential results of teaching them their country is based on slavery and genocide. History for children is just as much about mythology as anything.
I would be willing to bet that whatever the Germans teach it isn't some version of "and the jews were so happy that they piled into the trains and camps."
Not really a lie but I'm surprised how little they covered major international events, especially wars like WWI/WWII/Korea/Vietnam, etc.
All of them were basically a 3 paragraph maximum excerpt before you went back to reading about some random local policy or societal change that didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Biggest lie though was teaching kids that secondary sources like news publishers were reliable sources of information lol. NYT and the Washington Post sucked a long time before the internet. WP especially was just straight Imperialist propaganda sometimes.
Just because they're not a primary source doesn't mean they can't be biased or reporting false information.
Not really a lie but I'm surprised how little they covered major international events, especially wars like WWI/WWII/Korea/Vietnam, etc.
Is this in the US?
Because the version I learned about in my indoctrination American education was a lot of this was covered, but on a extremely Pro-american slant. Like literally everyone was struggling until America stepped in and stopped the Nazis, communists, etc. Even the narrative around the Vietnam war was that it was Americans helping the poor struggling citizens of Vietnam.
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.
You also run into the issue of little Billy not doing his homework because he already understands the lesson and doesn't want to waste his time.
My math teacher would make me take tests sitting next to her because I wouldn't do homework but aced the tests. Eventually she realized I wasn't cheating, I was just able to grasp the concept from her lectures alone.
But quizes should be used to determine which students need extra practice on a subject. Since everything is digital now, it wouldn't be difficult to build the algorithm.
No, discrimination is discrimination, school is as many hours as a full time job, if an education system can’t teach kids what they need to know in that amount of time it’s failing. Discrimination is wrong.
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.
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.
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.
I was also taught these things in the south, living in North Florida. As part of a 1 semester Florida history class in middle school, we also went into each of the spanish conquistadors and how they murdered their way across the continent.
Yeah we talked about colonialism in my middle school.
However, it was discussed as a fact of history and we went into detail about the slave trade triangle and all that.
And we did it without politicizing it. It was facts-based rather than pushing some weird political narrative about how america is heroic, or america is evil. Fancy that... just teaching history.
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.
Nah, I was taught the latter way in school. They pretty explicitly told us about the 3/5 compromise, the lack of voting rights for women, etc. Really, its pretty hard to avoid the idea that all people were not seen as equal in the eyes of the constitution when ratified, when you know that we have a whole unit on the civil war coming up.
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
Yah you didn't succumb to confirmation bias. I knew as a kid this was wrong because they said viewer was treated in the back... yeah then explain when i got laundry detergent on my fingers forgot about it and when to clean my fingernails layer and the tip of my tongue is absolutely tasting bitterness.
I remember the same teacher had a test question which was something like “you and a friend are playing at a landfill, and your friend spills sulfuric acid all over themselves, what should you do?” and the ‘correct’ answer was “pour sodium hydroxide on the spill” instead of my answer of “pour water on the spill.”
I had another science teacher who made a huge deal about her chronic Lyme, which is this really weird alternative medicine thing.
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
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.
The revolution started after the king called the Estates General in hopes of solving the debt crisis that had come in a large part from funding the American Revolution. The Estates General was a body made up of representatives of the three estates, the aristocrats, the clergy, and everyone else. The representatives of the third estate we're primarily new money bourgeoisie, but they were elected, unlike the other two, and could therefore claim to represent the people. After failing to come to an agreement, the representatives of the third estate broke away and formed the National Assembly.
How much the National Assembly actually represented the people is debateable, but they did have some claim to that, unlike the other groups. There were also several mass actions like the storming of the Bastille that indicated support for what the representatives were doing, at least in the early years of the revolution.
worse than that, if you do too good of a job you will be deemed too useful to promote, so not only will you be rewarded with more work but with career stagnation
Many countries, like America, had actual economic mobility. There was a time where working hard could improve your economic status.
My family lost everything. Twice. Once to over-leveraging before a mortgage collapse in 83, and secondly to a house fire. We lived in an absolute fleabag of a moldy motel, a stereotype like you'd see on-screen, for about 10 months. The mold was so bad we had tiny mushrooms.
We got back, both times, to a stable home life in a mortgage and a fresh start. Dad paid off his home before retirement, by working his absolute ass off.
That's just not feasible now, just one generation later.
Anyway, there was a time when hard work did get you something; so treat that as a historical thing and not a falsehood.
I think it's true, but I'm very few places. In the Marines, I was able to turn hard work into promotions, and now I'm regular life, I turn hard work into extra money, but only because I work for myself. So basically it only works in socialism or if you're at the top of the ladder.
Not everyone has the luxury of quiting a job on a dime like that and constant rejections when looking for a new job while being dogpiled at work will not help someone's mental state.
Which certainly persists to this day. People saying that the USA is "only 250 years old" while ignoring all of the First Nations/ indigenous peoples. It even ignores all of the European peoples that were there before the it was called USA.
I don't seem to encounter this with Canada very often which is interesting. And if we are going off of dates the current nation/ government is created why don't people say "oh well Germany is a young nation, they don't understand history"?
because through happy accidents (US tried to consciously do this through denazification but that was abandoned, while the USSR did successfully consciously do this for East Germany), the young (West) Germany was instilled with an extremely high sense of historical remorse partly because they were young.
i’ve never heard people say even half of “US is a young nation, they don’t understand history”
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
Look man, saying that the army wants a complete lack of critical thought in its soldiers is an entirely different conversation from 'do soldiers even have critical thinking skills'. You gotta pick one before we can communicate together.
I'm trying to engage in conversation with you in order to figure out how that was connected to my original statement about the lies that are frequently taught in schools.
Oh. Hey Velma. Sorry about the misgendering. Won't happen again.
*edit
My critical reading skills went out the window today.
You can read the previous stuff, but corsicanpuppy was saying the not even the army, which is more famous than public schools for dlsiking free thought, taught that listening to authority without giving it any critical thought was the way to go, much less public schools.
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.
We were taught 5 states (solid/liquid/gas/plasma/condensate (BEC and superconductors)), which has always felt like a decent enough explanation for 3rd graders. If you barely understand how to read a phase change diagram, you don't really need the confusing duality of being told "hey so this is totally wrong if you're a chemist, but fundementally true if you're an engineer" when you're still iffy on concepts like "vacuum boiling is not witchcraft".
Huh, that's really interesting. I'd have expected it was prior to condensate being introduced, not plasma, since plasma can be easily demonstrated in the classroom but condensates have really only been easily demonstrable for at most two decades. Very curious - do you remember if you had a standardized curriculum, and if so which one it was?
I also found it weird, I was taught 3 in school, but Plasma was already being considered a different state, just wasn't taught in schools. Condensate had only just been experimentally created and I didn't even knew about them until this thread.
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.
Communism and socialism are bad and never worked, as well as the lie that the settlers in the Americas were merely escaping religous prosecution, rather than wanting to kill people for land as already privledged Yeomanry. Also that the slave trade existed in Africa, in reality slavery was not an industry in the African continent and instead Europeans leveraged a small technological gap to trade slightly more advanced technology purely for slaves, which created the slave industry.
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“.
Because you can quite easily grow your own weed avoiding them sweet sweet tax money you're forced to pay when buying tobacco products. That's the only logical explanation I could craft and I've been thinking about the same question for a long time.
About 100+ years ago, drugstores/pharmacies were referred to as the “Druggist“. In Europe, the term “Chemist” was more popular. I would imagine that would be the etymological origin of the term.
Yeah, if you do acid you'll stick a pencil in your eye, or you'll try to claw your skin off. Turns out the real bad part of acid was that sometimes you might get sad for a bit, and you'll probably reach a point where you want the trip to be over, but it's not a big deal.
Routine trade doesn't have many 'important' events likewards because running smoothly is just normal life. Only one instance of merchants trading poor quality copper is noteworthy, because it didn't change the trajectory of a violent conflict.
This reminds me. You often hear it said "history is written by the victors," and while there's truth to that, I much prefer "history is written by those who wrote it down."
Because writing was, for most of history, an expensive and time-consuming process that only a few had access to, there are some big implications from that. One of which being that nobody was very inclined to write down the mundane day-to-day because it just wasn't worth it and few had any interest in preserving it.
Ouh, i recently learned that war is likely a product of humans abandoning their nomadic lifestyle for settlements and agriculture.
Yes, there was certainly violence between humans before, but since tribes were always on the move, resources at their current location weren't as valuabe/ worthy of defence. No berries here? Guess we'll move on.
Another tribe fishes here already? What is increasing your survival chances? Moving along the shore, looking for a different fishing spot or violently take the occupied one?
If you grew crops on fields it absoluetly made sense to defend your location. You can't take these plants with you, but they'll yield a lot of food you wouldn't want, or could affort to lose.
Not a lie, but a giant gloss-over: Germany was really late to the whole colonialism stuff. Almost all of the Americas, Africa and Asia was under colonial rule by the time we breifly got into the 'game'.
Left me with the impression that Germany was by far not as bad as other colonial nations. I wasn't even sure about where former Colonies were located, which countries are there currently and how German rule was. Turns out we were shitty overlords, like everybody else.
Omitting important context entirely is not simplification. Just saying 'these are the words and principals they aspired to, but did not do themselves' can be conveyed to young children but generally isn't taught until they are in their teens.
people also get really bent out of shape that history changes... because we learn more about it and historians change their consensus and interpretations of events over time.
Pluto is no longer a planet. It was a planet for a long time, but the definition changed because of new evidence that was discovered.
But people are so stubborn about stupid shit like this, they'd rather 'protest' these changes and new interpretations than just chill and be like 'oh ok, makes sense'. Or god forbid... choose to learn the new information rather than stay stubbornly ignorant about it.
Your teacher in 4th grade wasn't lying to you about Pluto or anything else, they just didn't know and they teach what is in the book, and the authors of the book probably didn't know either.
That there are different "learning styles", and that some people learn better with one over another. (Visual learner, auditory learner etc.) Same for "love languages"
It's pretty much not. Literally everyone learns best by "doing", and the other styles (reading, visual, auditory) depend much more on the content (visual graphs are good for geometry, reading is good for history etc) than the student. Also people's responses on surveys about learning styles are very inconsistent, it's pretty solidly disproven since about 2008
if you have disabilities that make you unable to learn in one style then of course some styles won't work for you. Near-sighted people who can't afford glasses already experience reduced performance in school. People like me who have Auditory Processing Disorder kind of get fucked in the ass if the teachers don't have any additional resources other than speaking in front of class.
But generally, learning styles was disproven. The difference of retention between ones "preferred learning style" and the control was insignificant, but learning in varied styles is better than only absorbing it in only one way. Relating information to another also helps more.
135 replies
mbti
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.
I mean, good luck. The Principle-Agent Problem is a classic of sociology, particularly with respect to business. If you can solve it, there's a Nobel in Economics waiting for you.
Democracy is an attempt at aligning in the interests of the plurality principles with their government agencies. But there's obviously a whole lot of flaws with democracy generally speaking, even before you get into the particulars of the American system.
I do think that the Lockean Social Contract, as the foundation for any governmental system, is a more interesting and more well-thought-out concept to explore than the mythology surrounding the American three-branch system. Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent does an excellent job of breaking down how a public body can be turned against its own interests. Zinn's People's History gives a ton of insight into the underbelly of the American political beast and how people respond to industrial and state oppression. State and Revolution does an excellent job of describing the role of the state in society and how it can best be dismantled.
But the endless debate around whether US Government works as described or intended really loses the forest of social economy for the ideological tent post trees. Fetishization of the US system only contributes to its rot and our own downfall.
the necessary lies of civilisation (timestamp link to 23:16 where discussion starts)
Pictures of the civil rights movement are in black in 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.
Color photos were a thing, but they were significantly more expensive than black and white until around the 1970s. They were mostly saved for special occasions.
Plus, news papers didn't really do much full color until the 80s. Before the mid 50s it was basically just the comic pages that had color. It was the launch of USA Today in 82 that popularized the way newspapers use color today.
Photographers capturing events shoot a lot of film, and there was no compelling reason to shoot in color at the time.
It's almost certainly isn't a conspiracy to make students think it happened a long time ago.
I first realized that in high school. Where it was showing civil rights photos from the 60s-70s in black and white, and acted like racism was OVER.
It would be interesting if this question prompted people to write the country as well as their answer.
They still teach the bullshit Thanksgiving story in most schools in the US.
still? That's actually really surprising. Not sure if that's more of a whitewash or more of a greenwash. Like maybe the teachers are racist idiots, but maybe they know and just like the tradition and want to give the kids something fun to do that feels good in a dark world. I don't think greenwash is the right term for that, but yeah.
I know a couple teachers that teach younger kids, I'll have to ask what they do.
I don't know what the existential results of teaching them their country is based on slavery and genocide. History for children is just as much about mythology as anything.
Maybe some Germans can answer this question.
I would be willing to bet that whatever the Germans teach it isn't some version of "and the jews were so happy that they piled into the trains and camps."
One of the benefits of being occupied after a war is you're taught the history. It's what the Union should have done in the South.
😬
Not really a lie but I'm surprised how little they covered major international events, especially wars like WWI/WWII/Korea/Vietnam, etc.
All of them were basically a 3 paragraph maximum excerpt before you went back to reading about some random local policy or societal change that didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Biggest lie though was teaching kids that secondary sources like news publishers were reliable sources of information lol. NYT and the Washington Post sucked a long time before the internet. WP especially was just straight Imperialist propaganda sometimes.
Just because they're not a primary source doesn't mean they can't be biased or reporting false information.
Is this in the US?
Because the version I learned about in my indoctrination American education was a lot of this was covered, but on a extremely Pro-american slant. Like literally everyone was struggling until America stepped in and stopped the Nazis, communists, etc. Even the narrative around the Vietnam war was that it was Americans helping the poor struggling citizens of Vietnam.
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.
You also run into the issue of little Billy not doing his homework because he already understands the lesson and doesn't want to waste his time.
My math teacher would make me take tests sitting next to her because I wouldn't do homework but aced the tests. Eventually she realized I wasn't cheating, I was just able to grasp the concept from her lectures alone.
But quizes should be used to determine which students need extra practice on a subject. Since everything is digital now, it wouldn't be difficult to build the algorithm.
No, discrimination is discrimination, school is as many hours as a full time job, if an education system can’t teach kids what they need to know in that amount of time it’s failing. Discrimination is wrong.
Or clubs for that matter, which are what primarily determines your college and scholarship opportunities in my state.
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.
Absolutely correct. Curriculum probably couldn't get into those matters of transition in fear of exposing the rotten stories surrounding it.
No wonder the King Leopold statues are under attack in Belgium like Confederate generals in the USA.
They kept silent about his palaces of course 🙃
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.
I was also taught these things in the south, living in North Florida. As part of a 1 semester Florida history class in middle school, we also went into each of the spanish conquistadors and how they murdered their way across the continent.
Yeah we talked about colonialism in my middle school.
However, it was discussed as a fact of history and we went into detail about the slave trade triangle and all that.
And we did it without politicizing it. It was facts-based rather than pushing some weird political narrative about how america is heroic, or america is evil. Fancy that... just teaching history.
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 just do not believe this. These are people who regularly raped their slaves, and then enslaved the progeny.
Nah, I was taught the latter way in school. They pretty explicitly told us about the 3/5 compromise, the lack of voting rights for women, etc. Really, its pretty hard to avoid the idea that all people were not seen as equal in the eyes of the constitution when ratified, when you know that we have a whole unit on the civil war coming up.
If we didn't have this lie, people wouldn't be as mad when they found the parts where it is untrue.
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
Yah you didn't succumb to confirmation bias. I knew as a kid this was wrong because they said viewer was treated in the back... yeah then explain when i got laundry detergent on my fingers forgot about it and when to clean my fingernails layer and the tip of my tongue is absolutely tasting bitterness.
We “learned” that in 6th grade science.
I remember the same teacher had a test question which was something like “you and a friend are playing at a landfill, and your friend spills sulfuric acid all over themselves, what should you do?” and the ‘correct’ answer was “pour sodium hydroxide on the spill” instead of my answer of “pour water on the spill.”
I had another science teacher who made a huge deal about her chronic Lyme, which is this really weird alternative medicine thing.
Was also confirmation bias in action
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!
The lesson is to give the authority figure the answer they want to hear so they'll leave you alone!
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
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.
People seem to forget that it almost immediately led to a military dictatorship
I think that's still an oversimplification.
The revolution started after the king called the Estates General in hopes of solving the debt crisis that had come in a large part from funding the American Revolution. The Estates General was a body made up of representatives of the three estates, the aristocrats, the clergy, and everyone else. The representatives of the third estate we're primarily new money bourgeoisie, but they were elected, unlike the other two, and could therefore claim to represent the people. After failing to come to an agreement, the representatives of the third estate broke away and formed the National Assembly.
How much the National Assembly actually represented the people is debateable, but they did have some claim to that, unlike the other groups. There were also several mass actions like the storming of the Bastille that indicated support for what the representatives were doing, at least in the early years of the revolution.
Working hard will get you rewarded. When really you get dunked on with more work.
worse than that, if you do too good of a job you will be deemed too useful to promote, so not only will you be rewarded with more work but with career stagnation
Many countries, like America, had actual economic mobility. There was a time where working hard could improve your economic status.
My family lost everything. Twice. Once to over-leveraging before a mortgage collapse in 83, and secondly to a house fire. We lived in an absolute fleabag of a moldy motel, a stereotype like you'd see on-screen, for about 10 months. The mold was so bad we had tiny mushrooms.
We got back, both times, to a stable home life in a mortgage and a fresh start. Dad paid off his home before retirement, by working his absolute ass off.
That's just not feasible now, just one generation later.
Anyway, there was a time when hard work did get you something; so treat that as a historical thing and not a falsehood.
Ahh, so that's how the economy fell off a cliff. It all makes sense now...
but it is a falsehood as it's not longer correct. I agree there was a time it was true, but that time has passed and we should not be teaching it.
What do you think “historical thing” means?
I think it's true, but I'm very few places. In the Marines, I was able to turn hard work into promotions, and now I'm regular life, I turn hard work into extra money, but only because I work for myself. So basically it only works in socialism or if you're at the top of the ladder.
This one for me too, hard work gets you nowhere without knowing people or ingratiating oneself and I am missing that gene
for people who are workaholics that is a reward.
until you are burnt out from overwork and can't move positions because you are "too valuable in your current role"
so just quit. if you're that good of a worker you'll easily get another job, probably with better pay.
Not everyone has the luxury of quiting a job on a dime like that and constant rejections when looking for a new job while being dogpiled at work will not help someone's mental state.
but you have the luxury of being miserable and overworked, OK.
No, you have the misfortune.
i love fedi, everyone goes 'no but u'
reminds me of 4th grade.
clearly fedi is full of very mature superintelligent linux users, who resort to grade school insults when you don't agree with them.
That Europeans discovered the 'new world', and that it was inhabited by 'savages' aka people with forgettable cultures, skills, and lifestyles.
Which certainly persists to this day. People saying that the USA is "only 250 years old" while ignoring all of the First Nations/ indigenous peoples. It even ignores all of the European peoples that were there before the it was called USA.
I don't seem to encounter this with Canada very often which is interesting. And if we are going off of dates the current nation/ government is created why don't people say "oh well Germany is a young nation, they don't understand history"?
I mean the USA as a country IS 250 years old, so I’m not sure where the issue is with that statement.
because through happy accidents (US tried to consciously do this through denazification but that was abandoned, while the USSR did successfully consciously do this for East Germany), the young (West) Germany was instilled with an extremely high sense of historical remorse partly because they were young.
i’ve never heard people say even half of “US is a young nation, they don’t understand history”
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
Listening to authority with no critical thinking will make your life easier.
They don't even teach that in the army, dude.
Isn't that the exact type of viewpoint the army wants in their soldiers? What are you talking about?
They went over handling bad orders in basic training man.
Seems like a lot of soldiers still obey bad orders.
Look man, saying that the army wants a complete lack of critical thought in its soldiers is an entirely different conversation from 'do soldiers even have critical thinking skills'. You gotta pick one before we can communicate together.
I was talking about lies that schools teach.
I'm trying to engage in conversation with you in order to figure out how that was connected to my original statement about the lies that are frequently taught in schools.
Also I'm not a man.
Oh. Hey Velma. Sorry about the misgendering. Won't happen again.
*edit
My critical reading skills went out the window today.
You can read the previous stuff, but corsicanpuppy was saying the not even the army, which is more famous than public schools for dlsiking free thought, taught that listening to authority without giving it any critical thought was the way to go, much less public schools.
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.
I grew up in California and they didn’t teach it.
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
We were taught 5 states (solid/liquid/gas/plasma/condensate (BEC and superconductors)), which has always felt like a decent enough explanation for 3rd graders. If you barely understand how to read a phase change diagram, you don't really need the confusing duality of being told "hey so this is totally wrong if you're a chemist, but fundementally true if you're an engineer" when you're still iffy on concepts like "vacuum boiling is not witchcraft".
I'm clearly a bit older (prior to plasma categorized) and was taught 4.
Huh, that's really interesting. I'd have expected it was prior to condensate being introduced, not plasma, since plasma can be easily demonstrated in the classroom but condensates have really only been easily demonstrable for at most two decades. Very curious - do you remember if you had a standardized curriculum, and if so which one it was?
I also found it weird, I was taught 3 in school, but Plasma was already being considered a different state, just wasn't taught in schools. Condensate had only just been experimentally created and I didn't even knew about them until this thread.
Yeah, I graduated high school in 2005, and it was three phases of matter, but there's also plasma, but we aren't going to talk about it.
Honestly I think it was just three now that you mention it and the other reply. Have no clue the curriculum, it was in the 70s.
The people who fought at the Alamo were heroes.
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.
Communism and socialism are bad and never worked, as well as the lie that the settlers in the Americas were merely escaping religous prosecution, rather than wanting to kill people for land as already privledged Yeomanry. Also that the slave trade existed in Africa, in reality slavery was not an industry in the African continent and instead Europeans leveraged a small technological gap to trade slightly more advanced technology purely for slaves, which created the slave industry.
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.
no one ever told you? it was to fuck with leftists and racial minorities. the same reason for everything fun being illegal.
Because you can quite easily grow your own weed avoiding them sweet sweet tax money you're forced to pay when buying tobacco products. That's the only logical explanation I could craft and I've been thinking about the same question for a long time.
I see anyone who uses being smart as an insult really saying "Smarter than me."
To be fair I was frankly amazed as a child that in American tv and media they so openly had shops called "drug stores"
About 100+ years ago, drugstores/pharmacies were referred to as the “Druggist“. In Europe, the term “Chemist” was more popular. I would imagine that would be the etymological origin of the term.
I think they still use "chemist" in Europe
Yeah, if you do acid you'll stick a pencil in your eye, or you'll try to claw your skin off. Turns out the real bad part of acid was that sometimes you might get sad for a bit, and you'll probably reach a point where you want the trip to be over, but it's not a big deal.
mmm'kay?
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.
That, and war makes for better narratives.
Routine trade doesn't have many 'important' events likewards because running smoothly is just normal life. Only one instance of merchants trading poor quality copper is noteworthy, because it didn't change the trajectory of a violent conflict.
This reminds me. You often hear it said "history is written by the victors," and while there's truth to that, I much prefer "history is written by those who wrote it down."
Because writing was, for most of history, an expensive and time-consuming process that only a few had access to, there are some big implications from that. One of which being that nobody was very inclined to write down the mundane day-to-day because it just wasn't worth it and few had any interest in preserving it.
Ouh, i recently learned that war is likely a product of humans abandoning their nomadic lifestyle for settlements and agriculture.
Yes, there was certainly violence between humans before, but since tribes were always on the move, resources at their current location weren't as valuabe/ worthy of defence. No berries here? Guess we'll move on. Another tribe fishes here already? What is increasing your survival chances? Moving along the shore, looking for a different fishing spot or violently take the occupied one?
If you grew crops on fields it absoluetly made sense to defend your location. You can't take these plants with you, but they'll yield a lot of food you wouldn't want, or could affort to lose.
Wow that is a really great way of putting it
Not a lie, but a giant gloss-over: Germany was really late to the whole colonialism stuff. Almost all of the Americas, Africa and Asia was under colonial rule by the time we breifly got into the 'game'.
Left me with the impression that Germany was by far not as bad as other colonial nations. I wasn't even sure about where former Colonies were located, which countries are there currently and how German rule was. Turns out we were shitty overlords, like everybody else.
Eating veggies will give you superpowers.
"then how come I never see anyone with superpowers?"
I mean, it makes you poop better, which is kind of like a superpower
Most of the things are more or less simplified for children.
I would not go as far as to call them outright lies.
There are many outright lies though. There is also much underestimation of the intelligence of children.
Omitting important context entirely is not simplification. Just saying 'these are the words and principals they aspired to, but did not do themselves' can be conveyed to young children but generally isn't taught until they are in their teens.
people also get really bent out of shape that history changes... because we learn more about it and historians change their consensus and interpretations of events over time.
Pluto is no longer a planet. It was a planet for a long time, but the definition changed because of new evidence that was discovered.
But people are so stubborn about stupid shit like this, they'd rather 'protest' these changes and new interpretations than just chill and be like 'oh ok, makes sense'. Or god forbid... choose to learn the new information rather than stay stubbornly ignorant about it.
Your teacher in 4th grade wasn't lying to you about Pluto or anything else, they just didn't know and they teach what is in the book, and the authors of the book probably didn't know either.
That there are different "learning styles", and that some people learn better with one over another. (Visual learner, auditory learner etc.) Same for "love languages"
What is the bullshit about that? AFAIK that is true and not everyone learns the same way.
It's pretty much not. Literally everyone learns best by "doing", and the other styles (reading, visual, auditory) depend much more on the content (visual graphs are good for geometry, reading is good for history etc) than the student. Also people's responses on surveys about learning styles are very inconsistent, it's pretty solidly disproven since about 2008
if you have disabilities that make you unable to learn in one style then of course some styles won't work for you. Near-sighted people who can't afford glasses already experience reduced performance in school. People like me who have Auditory Processing Disorder kind of get fucked in the ass if the teachers don't have any additional resources other than speaking in front of class.
But generally, learning styles was disproven. The difference of retention between ones "preferred learning style" and the control was insignificant, but learning in varied styles is better than only absorbing it in only one way. Relating information to another also helps more.
Left brain/right brain BS too. I cringe so hard every time I hear an adult talk about it.
"Communism is when the government does stuff."