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[Tiruin]

Caroline stories o___o

I love stories! Please tell more in the future!

[Orange Wizard]

Caroline stories o___o

I love stories! Please tell more in the future!

Only the happy stories, though.

[Neonivek]

So I started to collect all the things we are taught in school that are outright false (Whoa it is a big list)

and I have to ask...

Why teach history wrong on purpose?

Why do we need to believe that Christopher Columbus discovered that the earth was round and that his entire expedition was about proving that fact? Why do we have to believe that Galileo invented the heliocentric model of the universe and that his prosecution was entirely created because of that? Why do we need to think Thomas Edison did anything? Why do we need to upgrade WW2 Germany to super villains? Why do we teach that John A McDonald was the first Prime Minister of Canada when that position didn't exist? Why do we teach that the Native Americans had no concept of ownership but that is in fact a horrific oversimplification that tries to make it look like a simple mistake? Why do we need to make all Native Americans one nation onto themselves rather then a loose collection of groups with different beliefs, ideals, languages, stances, wishes, dreams, and wants? Why do we gloss over all the horrific tragedies we done in WW2 OTHER then the interment camps (such as the lich mobs)?

[Helgoland]

Oh boy, European history lessons sure are better than American ones.

[scriver]

...Lich... Mobs? I'm have to check my aggro.

Bad puns aside, it's hard to believe you're actually taught those ones.

[Il Palazzo]

Yeah, American lich mobs were pretty horrific. Not unlike Nazi Zombie hordes.

[Tack]

Australians are taught that the resident indigenous we happily butchered were a loose collection of tribes all with different languages. Apparently the big, northern ones made excellent slaves, so they even knew it way back then.



Also in WTF news, was rewatching scrubs and it's got some current-society flaws I didn't notice way back when.

[penguinofhonor]

.

[Neonivek]

Yep I remember when Johnny Appleseed used all those apples he planted to stop a famine.

Ohh wait I am sorry... The apples he grew were only suitable for hard apple cider.

Lets just say that the folk tales and the real story are oddly different (though the parts that are real... will surprise you...)

Also yep I am Canadian and because of that I have to learn American history too... from both television and we learn a bit of it in school.

Mind you not as avid as the Americans try to be (seriously you went to the moon first... get over it)

[FearfulJesuit]

It gets better than that...Appleseed actually did embody America's values, just not in a way that any elementary school teacher wants to talk about. Appleseed was an extremely canny real estate agent- back in the bad old days before sanitation, of course, you wouldn't drink water straight up- you needed alcohol. Beer was rare before the Germans came to America en masse, and whiskey was expensive and took time to get going, so the early pioneers in places like Ohio and Kentucky in the 1800's and 1810's would go for apple cider. Appleseed went ahead of the homesteaders, planted apples on good land, then showed them around all this land he owned that had apples ready to go on them, which he could sell for a tidy profit because the apples made the land more valuable.

[Neonivek]

They say he was generous.

Yet I never found anything that suggests he was... Did he do anything that he didn't benefit from?

[McDonald]

I'm on a school computer right now, wanted to check forum so started typing "bay" in address bar, it suggests www.bay12games.com/dwarves/. I have never gone there, so there's someone who plays DF in my school. I'm quite surprised.

[Lightningfalcon]

I know in the US we hate teaching anything that makes us look bad.

Depends on grade level and teh class.  In U.S history we went over a lot of very unflattering history. 

[penguinofhonor]

.

[EnigmaticHat]

Its pretty random in my experience.  In middle school, I think maybe even elementary school, we covered Japanese internment.  But one of my high school textbooks neglected to mention it.