You were probably taught at some point that people in the time of Christopher Columbus all thought the world was flat. However, this is a myth that pervades history - most people knew the earth was a globe! (Source)
Goddamnit! I’ve heard that so often already.
And then I learned separately that even the Greeks already knew not only that Earth was round, but even its circumference at a pretty good accuracy.
These two ‘facts’ genuinely had me thinking we must have lost a ton of knowledge from the Greeks…
The real truth is that the catholic church purposefully wanted people stupid and uneducated and that’s why people started believing in the flat earth even after the Greeks. but they don’t teach you that in school!
A lot of their knowledge was from the Sumerians and other ancient civilizations anyway. Sumerians were doing trig thousands of years before the Greeks did; the Greeks’ records were just the ones that were preserved.
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.
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?
@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 like saying caffeine or aspirin is a gateway drug because you probably try those before harder drugs. That’s not the only qualification for a gateway drug: it has to significantly increase the likelihood of trying additional drugs, which marijuana in the US does not. Elsewhere it varies, but in the US, you’re not more likely to try heroin because you’ve tried marijuana.
In my country (The Netherlands) weed is defacto legal and widespread yet we don’t suffer from a crisis as severe as the US has, if anything it’s probably less likely that people go to harder substances since weed is so safe and widely available. I can even proudly say that I have never seen a junkie on the streets here.
Cool concept but your site really needs some work done. I heard in school that lemmings would kill themselves and i went in the 2010s. This is only one such example, the best thing you could have done is map out which myths are most common where instead of the decade, and it would also be useful to add a important corrections list for the more important facts which you probably were misinformed about.
I think it’s possible that people are simply confused because the answers are the same for most decades. But one thing I would try maybe is setting the “value” of the different options, since that’s what you’re reading.
As I understand it, if no value is set, the browser should return the name instead, so the way you have it should work, but that may vary depending on browser.
EDIT: I tried to give an example, but lemmy keeps filtering out my explanation even if I enclose it in code tags. Hopefully you know what I mean.
It’s a neat website, but it is very America specific.
For example, I’m Australian and I wasn’t taught about slavery or genocide of our native people in high school. Hell, I was taught that the Stolen generation was a misnomer and children were only taken voluntarily or as an act of mercy… I graduated in 2008 so it wasn’t exactly the dark ages. Referring to the planned exterminations of the natives as “battles” and “conflicts” at best was another one. they didn’t even mention the shit that went down in Tasmania.
it’s not just the dumb stuff like food pyramids and taste zones, even in schools today history is being glossed over
I’m also a 2000s Australian high schooler and we had a notorious lack of Australian history taught to us. My school preferred to teach us the histories of pretty much every other country but our own. We didn’t learn a single thing about indigenous history at all, bad or good.
I had a history teacher in (US) high school who was not afraid at all to tell his students the whole truth about stuff like this. Its too bad he was the only one not allowed to teach government classes.
I think the words have to reach some sort of threshold for popularity before inclusion in the dictionary. Before that, it’s just industry jargon. There’s probably thousands of graphic design terms that aren’t in the dictionary right now.
Did anyone else learn that eggs are dairy products? (Meaning, the word ‘dairy’ encompasses both eggs and milk. Not that eggs are somehow produced by cows)
I had attributed that to our fuzzy food categories. Some of which are due to how ingredient usage doesn’t map well to botany, some is just marketing.
I suspect the perception of eggs as dairy could have shifted for practical reasons: lactose intolerance became more visible, and we needed a short way to say milk and milk products, without using the word milk.
Huh the Thanksgiving one I was taught that the Indians were nice to the new arrivals, but within a few short years that niceness was exploited and betrayed.
I guess maybe the welcome feast never occurred? But we certainly were taught the pilgrims drove the Indians out
• Contrary to what DARE might have taught you, marijuana is not considered a substantial gateway drug, with the best evidence being limited in nature, and with most marijuana users not going on to use other drugs. (Source) Yeah learn all that DARE BS.
• You were probably taught at some point that we’d never be able to map out the entire human genome due to its complexity. However, in 2003, we documented the first 92%, and in 2022 we documented the remaining 8%. (Source) nope I was told we will map it soon
• This one got shared by school nurses all around, but did you know that you shouldn’t tilt your head back if you have a nosebleed? This could cause you to choke or vomit as a result of blood going back into your throat, or - more severely - trigger a vomiting reflex and cause inadvertent harm. (Source) Nope but my mom is a doctor so I leaned from a lot from her
• You were probably taught at some point that people in the time of Christopher Columbus all thought the world was flat. However, this is a myth that pervades history - most people knew the earth was a globe! (Source) Yup
• On the topic of Christopher Columbus, you might’ve been taught that he was a pretty upstanding guy, or at minimum just that he was average in terms of morality. Take a second to Google his relationship to slavery and genocide. (Source) EHHH kind of, we talk briefly about him mass cutting off people hands and enslaveing people.
• A common myth that gets thrown around a lot in health classes is that cracking your knuckles can cause arthritis. This, as it turns out, isn’t true - it’s perfectly safe to crack your knuckles as much as you’d like. (Source) Heard that in school mom said it was wrong, I heard both the myth and the fact
• The original food pyramid was introduced in 1992, and seemed to imply that there were different tiers of ‘importance’ to what food you ate. Since changed in 2011, this was deemed an inaccurate and potentially harmful way to view food intake. Food is food after all! (Source) Nope never learned that there where tiers of food each part is good for you
• A fun fact about taste for you - there is actually no such thing as a ‘taste map,’ or the idea that different areas of the tongue result in you tasting different things. At most, there’s just different regions of sensitivity to taste! (Source) Nopw, saw taste map never learned that it was supposed to show where you taste things
• You’ve no doubt heard of this myth, perhaps not just from school - the idea that we only use 10% of our brains. This isn’t true - we use all parts of our brains, just at different times since each neural location has a specific purpose! (Source) Yeah heard that
• Another common myth is the idea that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. He was in fact not the inventor, just someone who helped to optimize its efficiency. (Source) yeah heard that
• There’s a good chance when you were younger, you heard classical music in the classroom to try and make you smarter. However, this is a myth - there is no such link between music and intelligence (or that we can measure intelligence for another matter!) (Source) Yeah heard that
• You’ve probably heard a lot about Thanksgiving being a supposedly peaceful gathering among Pilgrims and Indigenous Americans, but this is actually a myth - it led to a bloodbath brought on by colonial settlers. (Source) Yup heard that.
Fun Fact; they’re called “Meerschweinchen” (“little pigs of the sea”) in German as they were imported by Spanish sailors (as food, not as pets). I know they have been used as lifestock in South America way before that, but the sailors were basically the first ever time Germans heard about those animals.
The only thing I find a little weird about this picture is that it isn’t skinned. You can buy frozen whole rabbits in Germany, but they’re always skinned. Is this a hairless breed or did they somehow remove the fur?
There are hairless (mostly) guinea pigs, also known as house hippos. Not sure if that’s what they used here though. I don’t feel like I’ve ever seen an all pink one, they usually have some brown or black but 🤷♂️
Not Guinea, but I saw guinea pigs raised for food in a village in Tanzania. The local who owned them found it hilarious that we keep them as pets in the U.S. He asked me what we call them, and after i replied guinea pig, he said they definitely don’t taste like pig.
From a food travel show some time back, it seems that a lot of places cook them with the hair on. Not all from what I saw, but not unheard of so maybe it’s a “don’t remove the fish head/eyes, some people like it” kind or thing.
mildlyinteresting
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