Most everything that’s taught as the US “defending itself” against a foreign aggressor.
Yes, there are some specific instances the US legitimately needed to defend itself. However, this narrative that the US, especially as its promoted under the guise of “respecting our troops”, is mostly false.
Most wars the US fought were imperial and fought for the ambitions of American oligarchs.
I’d actually argue the narrative that’s central to US propaganda, that “soldiers fight for our freedom” is extremely harmful to said soldiers themselves. Their service and sometimes lives are wasted on the rich, not for freedom. People should really stop joining the military until that changes.
Oh boy, the list is long. We are teaching physics and chemistry like it’s a dogmatic religion, raising people who will believe everything as long as authority says it’s true.
Languages are taught as word and rules memorization, not use. You can spend ten years learning a language at school and you will not be able to hold a conversation with a stranger in country that speaks it.
Depending on how big of a fan of liberalism your history teacher is either every gay pair in history is just good friends or every two men who entered the same room in history are gays. No in-between.
Whole literary interpretation is just forced indoctrination. “Write your opinion so teacher can punish you if your opinion does not match the one written in government-approved book”.
Biology as another religious dogma lookalike. Medicine is literally just statistical guesses. The drug you are given was most likely tested on rats and then tested on poorest students who needed cash to survive. It proved 90% successful on them, doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to work on you. There were failures like drugs tested on white students that happened to have terrible effects of black people, and hose drugs were just sent to africa because “they passed tests on volunteers”. Your doctor isn’t prescribing you shit because he knows it works, he guesses what will help you because most of your symptoms fit hundreds of diseases. Most of the time your doctor will prescribe you specific thing because it worked when he had similar patient recently. Gods I could go for ages on this, my wife is in medical profession and I was constantly bombarded by her analyzing all scientific studies during COVID and talking about how shitty the panic was. The only thing I learned from that is that I can trust local doctor in nearly all cases and government/media propaganda in almost none.
I’m not gonna touch on history. I already know that americans might as well read superman and batman comic books instead of their history books and the knowledge would be the same. My own country has serious victim-hood kink in it’s history books that I’m severely sick of.
Home economics I think are the worst. According to what government wants youth to know about economy: food is a luxury, work is an obligation and trying to check what politicians do with your money is a crime.
I’m just going to address your first point, what aspect of physics and chemistry are taught as dogmatic? I was science I was taught was framed as the consensus based on the preponderance of evidence not religious dogmatic based on authority. Maybe your experience was different but even in the catholic school I went to that wasn’t my experience.
We’re constantly taught about “the laws of physics”, etc., when no such “laws” exist. They’re simply well established theories. Likewise we’re told that physicists are discovering the “laws of the universe”. Etc. This is rampant throughout physics - not just in education but in all media, news, etc. It feeds into grifts like “AI” because people are used to sloppy, meaningless language. It completely undermines any scientific understanding.
(I don’t care/know enough about chemistry to comment on that. Probably more grifters using bullshit language to get funding.)
Laws is easier to say than well established theories :) seriously if you whole beef is simply the well established term i think you’re trying to hard to find fault
I wonder how they will react when they discover dictionaries and their brutal authoritarian chokehold on the words that make up language.
You clearly don’t know anything about the current drug development and clinical testing methods. Please look into it more before spouting such nonsense.
What nonsense? Are you trying to tell me every drug is tested on every person alive?
Wow now THAT is a wiild requirement…Why would you need something tested in every human alive to know it’s good enough to prescribe to someone that’s going to die without it? Do you understand how statistical probability works?
If I told you you have cancer and I can give you a treatment that works 90% of the time and is your best option (which is literally how they frame it), that’s not good enough for you? I shouldn’t offer a service that I can’t guarantee will save you, I should just say “sorry bud, I have a really good idea of what almost always works but…it hasn’t been tested on you yet so we just shouldn’t do anything”
- I what country is it taught like a dogmatic religion? Can’t be Denmark, Sweden, Germany, The Netherlands, France, or Spain (all countries I have personally lived in or have family). I wonder what your background is, as the only kinds of people I hear talk about science being taught like a dogmatic religion are either themselves heavily religious, or are conspiracy nuts.
- That depends on the language. Some languages have lots of rules, others are more loose. Some have a difference between spoken and written languages. Here in Denmark the language curriculum has changed somewhat, from largely learning the written language to largely learning the spoken language. Either way, memorisation is how it has to start.
- I’ve only ever seen the “in-between”, never those extremes. I still wonder what country you’re from. I’ve experienced this duality more in fandoms.
- The literary classes I went to required everyone to defend their opinions and interpretations on whatever novella or short-story we’ve read. You’d actually lose points if you just parroted the common perception without being able to explain why you agree with it.
- Statistical guesses, huh? Is that what repeated experimentation and observation is to you? Just guesswork? Yes, the panic during COVID-19 was indeed stupid, but what does that have to do with the study of biology? How does that relate to the studies your wife read or your trust in your GP?
- By this comment I am guessing you come from Germany. Makes me question the validity of your previous statements.
For your first point, you can add Canada. It is not taught like that there (personal experience) although the more you learn, the more you see how the “laws” are more theories that actually explain things than 100 % fact. But that’s beside the point the original commenter was making.
I hate it when people say “just theory”. In science facts are theories. Everything is theory. Your whole existence is a theory. A theory is something that has held up to observations, testing, and scrutiny.
People conflate hypothesis and theory all the time. Doesn’t help that all media basically does the same.
Stuff like this is why I think it shouldn’t be allowed to homeschool your children.
mbti
MBTI is fun and seems to work well when done for no practical purpose
I participated in the MBTI communities in Reddit and people seemed to be sorted by something important they had in common you could see the stereotypes of the 16 types in their subreddit designs or their absence from reddit
It’s useless in the workplace because it’s too easy to game
I agree that there are clear patterns that arise, but there is no scientific evidence to suggest that the axes chosen (aside from introversion/extroversion) map importantly onto the brain. You could just as easily pick any other personality traits to form other patterns.
The people who fought at the Alamo were heroes.
That different parts of your tongue taste different things.
When I was little, we did an experiment where we were supposed to “feel” which part of our tongue we were tasting things with, and I was like, “pretty sure I taste it everywhere”. That teacher was fired for her anger issues at the end of the year, and that was certianly one of the moments where it came out, haha.
the necessary lies of civilisation (timestamp link to 23:16 where discussion starts)
“Communism is when the government does stuff.”
Yeah they don’t teach this in social studies and any school in America.
They actually teach what socialism is and what communism is. That’s where I learned it.
And why I know the difference between the two and what the definitions are both of these things.
In German schools, horseshoe theory is pretty much taught as a fact.
I remember my first description of communism from a teacher in 5th grade.
“The government can force you to work in any field they decide. If they need dentists, they might just force you go to dentists school for 4 years. If after that, they decide they need plumbers, they will send you to plumber school and you will be a plumber. You don’t get to choose. If you don’t like it, they will send you to Siberia, which is a bad place.”
In theory, they could have done something like that, but outside of wartime conscription, why would you?
For basic practical reasons, a communist government is still broken into a million organisations, which operate and hire just like anywhere else.
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.
The annual lie: Next year isn’t going to be as easy as this year!
Middle School will be harder than Elementary School.
Junior High will be harder than Middle School.
Senior High will be harder than Junior High.
College will be harder than Senior High.
Working a real job will be harder than School.
“They won’t take late work”
You don’t want that to go on your permanent record.
Me coming up with excuses for missing work in High School: “Um, my parents both died in a horrible accident, I got cancer, and my dog ate my textbook.”
Me coming up with excuses for missing work in my job: “Yeah, I didn’t do it.”
And at work, you give yourself an A and go for a C.
I frequently wanted to kill myself, the idea work would be even worse than school really didnt help because school was absolutely awful. So it will only get worse isn’t a great message.
Columbus discovered America.
At least this is what I was taught when I was in elementary school back in the '90s.
I have no idea if it’s changed thus far.
Columbus was the first European to explore Cuban isles. Lief Erickson explored Newfoundland about 400 years before I believe.
Indigenous people discovered and settled the Americas >20,000 years ago.
It’s especially funny since dude never even touched USA, but USA is racist/genocidal enough to worship dude anyway.
I fucking hate Columbus day.
Let’s pop open the diaraies of his crew mates and him and do a read a loud, then! Let’s talk about it.
I passionately hate Christopher Columbus and the worship of him.
I also despise the fact that it’s a national holiday here in the States. I’m not even sure precisely what it is that we’re celebrating.
I mean if we’re going to commemorate explorers why not Marco Polo or Ponce de Leon or Lief Erikson.
I was taught Captain Cook discovered Australia, he wasn’t even the first European
He wasn’t a captain either
Neither was Cap‘n Crunch
Everyone knows it was Cap‘n Crunch
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Germany, a lot of the times it’s taught that we barely did colonialism. Like, “colonialism was bad but it was mostly other countries”. Meanwhile, in reality, German colonialism saw the first mayor genocide of the 21st century.
I read it as the first mayo genocide and was ready to cheer
You want to get rid of all mayonnaise?
Those poor mayors.
Oh god, sometimes I feel like my English is pretty good and then stuff like this happens… :D
I’ll add to that: And that germany improved the lives of people in the colonies because they build railway and Electricity
Also: the classic “people didnt know the nazis would do such things.” “Austria was the first victim of the nazis” both ofc wrong. Austria participated actively in all crimes germany did and the centiment that germany and austria should unite was wide spread in both. And OF COURSE THE PEOPLE KNEW WHAT THE NAZIS WERE PLANNING TO DO!
The group leader in dachau also told us “the gas chambers here were luckily never used” Another good one is about reunification that it was all peacful and happy and sunshine, unlike its actually gutting out the entire industry and economy of east germany.
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”
Left brain/right brain BS too. I cringe so hard every time I hear an adult talk about it.
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.
Texas History
