Question #231

[weofodthignen]

Were you taught anything in school that turned out to be factually wrong?

Comments

[dubhain]

Addendum:

They also told us that cats, dogs, and other animals couldn't really feel pain; that they weren't self-aware; that they were not intelligent; they could not communicate; they could not problem-solve; &c. One of the primary criteria they used for determining humans were the only intelligent species was that, supposedly, only humans were tool-users. Tool use was the primary criterion for determination.

They also told us that "Democracy™" and capitalism were superior economic and political systems to any other which had ever been tried or envisioned. They told us that the United States would never, ever perform any of the actions nor institute any of the policies that were seen as abuses or abominations in the Third Reich of Germany, or the CCCP / ROC. Because we were the "Good Guys™," and "Morally superior" to all of those nations. Many of the policies and actions they assured us would never happen have become the "new normal," in recent years. (Cf. Current abductions in Portland, OR, by Federal personnel wearing no agency or unit insignia; simply dressed in "camo" fatigues, grabbing people off the streets without warning, as a part of Donald Trump's decree that "Our sacred monuments will be protected.") (Cf. the requirement in some Southwest states that Latinx folk must carry citizenship and/or residency papers on their persons at all times, or risk deportation as "Undesirable Aliens.") (Cf. the increasing erosion of constitutional protections against one's home being invaded by law enforcement personnel without a search warrant. Same for personal search and seizure.)

They told us that, if we were in trouble, we could always run to a Policeman, and that we could trust the Police to protect us and help us, in a crisis.

They taught us that, no matter how dire the crisis that might arise, we could always be confident that Science and Scientists would find a way to solve it.

They taught us that, if we were willing to work hard and not be lazy, that we could get ahead in life, live well, and enjoy a standard of living better than that which our parents did, and that we were raised in.

They taught us that the US won the war of 1812.

They taught us that the US, primarily, was responsible for winning WWI and WWII.

There are many other things they taught us, which were wrong. Some things I can see...we revise our teaching and our understanding, as we gain knowledge, and cringe at our former ignorance and stupidity. Some of them...were simply wrong.

[weofodthignen]

Sigh. I went to a very good school, and the last year of the legally required Religious Studies class consisted of issues discussion and essays (that may also have been legally required), where the very earnest, somewhat naive Church of England/Episcopalian teacher did her best to raise and deal with issues such as nature/nurture fairly and tolerantly. Other stuff you mention, we simply weren't taught about. The school had a policy of ending history classes with World War I in order not to teach "politics", and it was perfunctorily covered, with emphasis on the causes and on the pressure to volunteer. (I think now that the Irish independence movement was one of their main reasons; I was in high school at the height of the IRA bombing campaign.) But we had thoughtful units on the French Revolution, the U.S. War of Independence, the Boer and Crimean Wars, as well as interminable stuff about the Luddites and other workers' rebellions in Britain and the Corn Laws, OMGs the Corn Laws, and I think their coverage of both the Opium Wars and Britain's mistakes in India including the Sepoy Rebellion and the Black Hole of Calcutta was as sensitive as they could make it. We definitely spent time learning about our country's colonial guilt and the flaws of gunboat diplomacy; because the geography teaching was weak, I didn't have a good idea of the actual extent of the Commonwealth until I did a badge on it in Girl Guides. (The school went private a year after I left, and I have the impression it now teaches modern history to the exclusion of almost all other history.)

I found news profoundly uninteresting as a teen, because it was all about particular MPs and their pontifications and feuds, policies defined in such wooly and jargon-filled terms they could be interpreted a number of ways, and the yearly adjustments to a Byzantine system of taxation. So it's partly my fault, and partly the school's, that I still have little idea how the UK's system of governance and laws works, but I don't think that's too unusual. The US's system was founded in revolution to be explicitly both new and accessible, and the US has a tradition of requiring schools to teach it from that angle. I'm kind of glad I didn't learn about World War II; it's been fun learning about it from a combination of my parents' lived experience as children and what I've found interesting myself, rather than having to memorize campaign maps of North Africa and the Pacific, and for the first half of the 20th century in general I'm grateful for all the modern historians who have created the whole "history of everyday life" approach, so now I can read about 1930s bestselling British women's fiction, the New Woman of the 1910s and 1920s in America and different European countries, the government-provided birth control clinics of Weimar Germany, and the process of getting street lighting into US cities, as well as all the later stuff that gets classed as politics, like the routing of interstates through black communities in the US and the 1980s young people's "riots" in the UK. I have a lot I don't need to unlearn. In science, I think what we were not given an opportunity to learn was a crime. In history and ideology, I'm tempted to say I'm better off; but a lot of it is due to the internet.

[dubhain]

I was lucky enough to go to a particularly good school district. I was able (unlike most US high school students) to take 20th century European history (which stopped just after WWII, to avoid discussing the EU and the rise of Socialism in Europe.) 20th Century Wars (which also touched upon some of the late 19th century conflicts such as the Sino-Japanese War,) US Constitutional Law, Shakespeare, Humanities, contemporary World Politics, &c. I role-played representing Albania and Libya in Model UN. Won an award for role-playing Albania, I did.

I was also lucky enough to know better than to accept everything they taught us as gospel. We were taught to think critically, earlier in school, before they stopped doing that, and some of my teachers taught the official curriculum, while annotating it with comments and admonitions that...would be considered very subversive today, bless them. So I didn't believe that we won the American Revolution, or the two world wars singlehandedly, I also watched far more Canadian and British TV than most US folks (we had CBET Channel 9, from Windsor, ON, which helped broaden my worldview at least a bit.) And there was always BBC shortwave, once I had a receiver.

As I've certain unsavory ancestral connections regarding WWII, I spent a lot of time studying how the NSDAP came to power and what happened, in Germany, during WWII. I was also lucky enough to take (one of?) the first history-of-the-Holocaust classes taught at college level in the US, so far as I'm aware of. But I remember discussing "Checks and Balances™" in high school, and being told I was talking nonsense when I explained how they could be easily circumvented. As they have been. (I insisted that the key to doing so was either neutering or stacking the US Supreme Court. Go figure.) So I didn't believe everything I was taught, and all the indoctrination didn't take. But watching the US turn into what it's become, today, has been...remarkable. The parallels between things happening now, and Weimar / post-Weimar Germany are...also remarkable. And I'm very much believing Ivanka Trump's divorce testimony that the only book she ever saw Donald read was a book of Hitler's speeches he kept upon his nightstand. He's doing an inept job of emulating Hitler, but there are a lot of similarities in what he's trying to do and how he's trying to do it.

One of the biggest failings of the US in the Cold War, IMO, was that it never really imagined what might happen if the CCCP actually did collapse. We were so busy fighting it, ideologically, that we never contemplated what would happen if it suddenly were no longer there to keep us playing the "Good Guy™" role. We simply assumed, in a typically American act of inexcusable naivete, that we'd continue to be "The Good Guys™" because we simply believed in our own ideological and moral superiority — which has always been the US' version of the "Master Race" delusion so formerly beloved of the Germans, Japanese, and a helluva lot of White Folks in the Western world. (I won't get into discussing how the definition of 'race' has shifted, relatively recently, from ethnicity to skin color, but that's also an interesting subject.) We seem to have inherited a lot of our arrogant notions and prejudices from our colonial parent, and then reupholstered and distilled them (if you'll pardon my mixing metaphors) through the lens of Hollywood, and embraced them as something akin to both revealed truth and mutating into religious dogma. A dogma we're still, desperately, clinging to, because — much like Weimar Germany — we're terrified of facing the truth regarding how our world has changed since the Berlin wall fell, in '89. Certainly, none of the US "retro" craze, which started with the release of American Graffiti, back in '73, but didn't really get going until Happy Days first aired in '74, and has been re-embraced concerning the '70s and '80s in more recent years. First, we desired a diversion from Watergate and the stagflation years, and now we seek an escape from the confusion and uncertainty of the post-Cold-War era. Just as Weimar Germans sought their escape from the humiliation and devastating aftermath of the Versailles treaty. Put Fox News in the role of the Münchiner Beobachter, Trump's rallies and attempts at State military parades in the role of Hitler's rallies and Nuremburg pageants, his scapegoating of Latinx and Black folks rather than the Jews, and you have a fairly comprehensive parallel to NSDAP Germany during the '30s. Granted, with variations, but the similarities are...troubling.

Not to mention what Customs & Border Patrol are currently doing to US Citizens on the streets of Portland as I type. That's...some SA/Gestapo level action, right there....

[weofodthignen]

Yeah, unpleasantly so. I hadn't known Ivanka said that.