Top Ten Lies Your Teachers Told You in School
10. The Peppered Moth
Via bbc.co.uk
Lie Told
The peppered moths of Britain evolved from light to dark because of the pollution caused by the industrial revolution.
Why It Is a Lie
Teachers love this little story because it makes it so easy for students to understand the concept. The image of the light and dark moths on light and dark surfaces is simple to grasp. Too bad the tale is more black and white than the moths.
Peppered moths came in a variety of shades, from light to dark and have existed as such since before the industrial revolution. By oversimplifying the situation, natural selection is painted as a life-or-death situation.
Why It Shouldn’t Change
Middle school students don’t really need to grasp the complexities of natural selection. Further explanation in later grade levels builds on this basic, but not complete concept.
9. Van Gogh’s ear
Lie Told
Crazy Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear and gave it to a girl as a token of his love. Did we mention that he was crazy?
Why It Is a Lie
While the crazy part is a fact, and the gift giving part may be true, Van Gogh did not cut off his own ear. He actually lost it in a fight with friend and fellow artist, Paul Gauguin.
Why It Should Change
People don’t need to think Van Gogh was crazier than he was.
8. The Scientific Method
Via Sciencebuddies.org
Lie Told
Scientists follow a rigid procedure called the “scientific method” for every experiment conducted.
Why It Is a Lie
There is no one method or procedure. Science isn’t a wash, rinse, repeat kind of thing. While hypothesis-experiment-conclusion is a method used by scientists, it is one of many.
Why It Should Change
By telling such a lie, children are led to believe that there is no creativity or imagination in science.
7. Pocahontas
Lie Told
Pocahontas was an adult Powhattan princess who saved John Smith’s life and later fell in love with him.
Why It Is a Lie
First and foremost, Pocahontas was twelve at the time that John Smith and his crew landed in the New World. That takes care of the adult and, hopefully, the romance pieces of this tale. Furthermore, there were no witnesses to the part about her saving John Smith’s life. Last but not least, John Smith had a well recorded tendency to exaggerate and embellish stories.
Why It Shouldn’t Change
The Disney remake would be far less magical.
6. Salem Witch Trials
Lie Told
Witches were burned at the stake in Salem, MA.
Why It Is a Lie
While many accused witches were burned at the stake in England, British law did not allow the punishment in their colonies. Instead, witches were hanged if they managed to survive death row.
Why It Shouldn’t Change
The method of death is far less important than the reasons for the deaths. While factually inaccurate, the important information about the events doesn’t have to do with the manner of death.
5. The Founding Fathers’ religious beliefs
Via wilsonsalmanac.com
Lie Told
The Founding Fathers were all Christians.
Why It Is a Lie
The Founding Fathers held a wide array of religious beliefs, ranging from Christianity to Deism. Thomas Jefferson rejected the concept of the Trinity and loathed the idea of a national religion. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were Deists.
Why It Should Change
It is important that the reality of our founding fathers beliefs be understood, but it is most important that the emphasis of the separation of church and state be taught.
4. Ben Franklin and the Kite
Via ushistory.org
Lie Told
Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity by flying a kite in a lightning storm and, subsequently, getting struck by lightning.
Why It Is a Lie
While Benjamin Franklin did propose the idea of a kite experiment, he never actually went through with it. If he had, he would likely have died.
Why It Shouldn’t Change
Children already know being struck by lightning will kill you. They can keep this story.
3. George Washington and the Cherry Tree
Lie Told
Little George Washington chopped down his father’s cherry tree. When called out on it, he confessed to being a pint-sized pain in the butt.
Why It Is a Lie
George Washington’s biographer inserted the made-up story, and other tall tales of the late President, into his two books. He did this, presumably, for his own amusement.
Why It Shouldn’t Change
Ironically, it teaches kids that they shouldn’t lie.
2. Thanksgiving
Lie Told
The Native Americans and Pilgrims had a potluck dinner/lovefest filled with fat turkeys and corn. Everyone lived happily ever after.
Why It Is a Lie
The entire story is a romanticized version of history. While the Pilgrims and Native Americans did break bread many times, it was never a tradition or annual occurrence.
Why It Should Change
Learning the reality of the relationship between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans would give students a better historical insight into the foundations of America, and the impact of our arrival here on the Native American way of life.
1. Newton and the Apple
Via telegraph.co.uk
Lie Told
Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity when an apple fell on his head.
Why It Is a Lie
This story was never mentioned by Newton. It didn’t come into existence until around sixty years after it allegedly happened. The lie was first told by John Conduitt, who was most likely using the apple as a literary device. The part about the apple viciously attacking Newton’s noggin was added later.
Why It Shouldn’t Change
It gives children hope that one day they could have that “lightbulb moment” just like one of mankind’s geniuses.
this post sucks ass. Half the crap you explained are actually more lies. Pocahontas, the first Thanksgiving, the cut off ear… the “truths” you tell are just as inaccurate and just more know-it-all blatherings.
Yeah… it amazes me how much of a bias even a seemingly simple and harmless top ten list like this can have. Get the facts on what our founders really meant by separation of church and state, then try again.
Its like saying microsofts Expedia.com was before priceline.com or http://www.onlyrooms.com
To everyone that does not condone lying to children. Your lying to yourself. People lie to kids all the time. Santa Clause, Easter bunny, tooth fairy, another fine example…
Child walks in “Daddy what are you doing to Mommy”
” Umm go on into the hall, I’m just helping mommy crack her back.” or Mothers and fathers introducing a new lover as an aunt or uncle. these are all lies told to children that no one has a problem with. Ohhh my favorite lie is
When a man and a woman love each other very much blah blah blah.
Why it’s a lie? Love and sex are 2 different things, but who wants to kill romance and teach kids the physical urge side of it.
About primary colors, you have to distinguish between “light” (for example: a rainbow) and “solid” colors (for example: paint).
As far as your tv or computer screen is concerned, primaries are red, blue and green, and combining them will produce all other colors. White would be all primaries combined, whereas black is the absence of color.
If you’re a painter, primaries are red, blue and yellow and combining them will produce all other colors. Black is the combination of all primaries and white the absence of any colors.
Magenta, cyan, etc. are precise names of primaries. Blue is a generic name for many different shades (example : powder blue, cobalt, ultramarine). Same goes for red, green, yellow, orange, etc. But since most people won’t study colors that deeply, it’s ok for them to learn it that way.
“Queen Isabella sold her jewels to finance Columbus.” No, she issued an edict against the Jews and made THEM cough up.
It’s sad to see this kind of false information on this website. The Scientific Method, Franklin piece and the founding fathers piece are all horribly inaccurate. Franklin was a deist at a young age but changed his philosophy by his mid twenties. Adams and Jefferson BOTH wrote extensively about the necessity of teaching a belief in God in public schools. They were opposed to teaching or endorsing a specific religion but a reliance on God was believed imperative by all of the founding fathers.
This website should be ashamed.
From crossword puzzles to car repair to programming malware, all problem solving follows the scientific method.
@ghoti: they are talking about visual light not paint mixing. there are only 3 colors of visible light. blue yellow red. blue being the shortest wavelength therefore it gets scattered easiest. that’s why our sky is blue. and red being the longest wavelength therefore it doesn’t scatter as easily and has to travel through more atmosphere to be diffused, therefore our our sunsets r red.
Why would a teacher EVER lie to children? Just tell them the truth. I don’t understand what’s so hard about that. And the propositions by the author for teachers to keep telling lies in some cases? Absurd.
Evolution is the biggest lie. Like creation, it is a theory (a ridiculous one) and the weaker of the two. I remember my grade 10 science book saying “The neck of the giraffe grew to reacher talker trees” by the time it started growing the surroundings and trees would have changed multiple times..!!!
Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were freemasons.
@Matt, Anderson, and songbird.
The primary colors of PIGMENT are Red, Yellow, Blue. The primary colors of LIGHT are Red, Green, Blue.
The primary colors of light (R,G,B) did not stem from technology. They are found in nature. So yes, songbird, green is a primary color. Look it up.
Cyan, Magenta, Yellow are used as primary colors mostly in digital imaging and is interchangeable with R,Y,B.
Please stop perverting the Constitution. There is nothing in the 1st amendment that indicates that there should be a separation of church in state. It basically states that we should have the right to practice religion or not practice religion. And yes, that there is not to be a nationally recognized religion. But read the Constitution and Declaration of Independence closely, they were all men of faith. This is evident by the fact that they said that the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were endowed by “OUR CREATORS”!
From what I understand, Ben Franklin was a Deist, but belonged to multiple churches and donated money to some of them.. Some believe that as an entrepreneur he did so for networking purposes. FWIW, the Franklin Institute has a FAQ page… Was Ben a Quaker? http://www.fi.edu/franklin/birthday/faq.html#06 Did Ben pray? http://www.fi.edu/franklin/birthday/faq.html#18
Actually there are 2 types of light. Additive and subtractive. So both RYB and Cyan, Magenta and yellow are the primaries. In their differing types of light.
I wished Franklin’s story to be changed: if a coconut would fell on him.. Laws of Gravity wouldnt exist today… ha ha ha…
Oh another big lie: Liberals care about anyone who don’t believe what they do or have a brain to pass between them.
The Lie: Christianity
Why it should be stopped: Look at what it has done to the world around us.
this whole article is as flawed as the information some teachers taught young kids.
most of these lies mentioned are inaccurate themselves… teachers do not teach that thanksgiving was celebrated every year by the pilgrims, but that the thanksgiving holiday is in celebration of the fact that the Native Americans helped out the colonies…
To NarkedBrit,
America was named after Amerigo Vespucci. Go to Wikipedia which is a peer-reviewed site and research him. You will not find anything on Robert Ameryck in Wikipedia or Google.
Scalping was a native American thing before the Confederates.
Nobody said crucifixion was not an Egyptian/Mongolian thing…
Where do you get your info? Do some research before you say nonsense.
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Pocohuntas was the daughter of chief Powatan. She became friend with Captain John Smith, to try to stop a prophecy that Powatan and his people would be distroyed by a people who would come from across the sea. On April 5, 1614, she married John Rolfe. Their son Thomas was born January 30, 1615. In 1616, she and Rolfe went on a trip to London, where she dazzled those at the court of King James. She died the next year on March 21st, while on a ship returning to Virginia. Theories as to why she died include pneumonia, smallpox, tuberculois or even poisining.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocahontas
http://www.biography.com/articles/Pocahontas-9443116
Either your schools sucked or you were a marginal student at best.
1) You never understood natural selection if that’s what you got out of the peppered moth story.
2) You will not find more than a handful of biomedical studies or other hard sciences (you know, the real sciences) that do not follow the scientific method. As earlier stated, to be funded you MUST follow the scientific method. You must have a hypothesis and must make observations about it and be able to convey a novel conclusion. There is nothing inherent about that sequence that stifles creativity. Your hypothesis and the methods to test it are not restricted except by ethics.
garbage. who is the author of this? i have never wanted to punch someone in the face more in my life. talk about lies. you just told a bunch chief. sorry life hasnt worked out the way you wanted it too guy.
The peppered moth example of evolution is not a lie. In fact, your response as to why the moth story is a lie betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about how evolution and natural selection works. Evolution is best explained from a perspective of populations of organisms, and it is a measure of allele frequency and change. With the peppered moth, what scientists saw was a preponderance of white moths (and few black moths) before pollution, and a preponderance of black moths after pollution hard darkened trees. That is precisely how evolution works.
Where you are going wrong is that you seem to think that selection pressures CAUSE beneficial mutations, and the fact that these phenotypes may have existed previously thus disproves evolution, but no biologist thinks that! Organisms have a variety of phenotypic and genotypic differences in large populations, owing to factors like recombination and mutation. These changes are random and are not directed by events. Selection pressures (like the pressures of increased predation for moths) thus don’t cause the mutations and changes, but cause the mutations and changes that are always occurring in a population to trend toward those that confer a survival advantage. In the case of the peppered moths, those moths that had mutations that caused a darker coloration became prevalent once selection pressures conferred that phenotype with a survival advantage. In essence, your insistence that the peppered moth story is a lie is the real lie, based on a faulty understanding of evolution.
You are also wrong that there scientists do not follow a method, and that following a method denies creativity. Nothing could be further from the truth! Naturally, you do not provide one single example of what would constitute a scientific investigation that strays outside of the scientific method, and I strongly suspect that is because it cannot be done. Granted, some post-modernism and historicism in the philosophy of science tries to argue that there is no method to science because people have not always followed that method, but that’s like saying there aren’t any rules to chess because some people cheat or try to play before learning the rules. But you did not state any evidence or reason for thinking there is no scientific method, so I shall not speculate further. The idea that following the method stifles creativity, though, is ridiculous. The first step of the method, hypothesis-generating, is full of creativity and creative problem-solving. The fact that the rest of the method ensures that the creative hypotheses must then conform to reality is no criticism of science.
While I commend your efforts to try to expose lies, I think it would be worthwhile to do bit more research, lest you spread lies of your own concoction. It would also be helpful to be more explicit and offer more evidence and sources for your claims.
I don’t think I would call these “lies” since the adults probably were just repeating what they’d been taught.
Whether we should continue to stick to the inaccurate information or officially correct them and why is interesting.
The comments are entertaining. It’s surprising which items on the list (or the list itself) people want to climb up on their soapbox over.
They should all be changed to reflect the truth. Justifying telling lies because that paints a nicer impression? Sounds like a step in the wrong direction. Don’t deceive kids and belittle them. Empower them with knowledge!
There was never a separation of church and state with the founders. The first printing of the bible was commissioned by Congress for distribution to schools. Please get your facts right your just continuing the false information perpetuated in our school system. You obviously don’t have the capacity to do the research of honesty. Hopefully you don’t have access to children and their education.
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Sounds like the author is a ‘new ager,’ intent on putting their spin on history. Why no mention of the concentration camps in WWII, man landing on the moon, or the real reason(s) evolution is the biggest lie of all?
My teachers told me many lies in school (man-powered flight was impossible, white bread was the same nutritionally as brown bread, etc). But some of these aren’t lies. For example:
It is the manuscript for what would become a biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life written by William Stukeley, an archaeologist and one of Newton’s first biographers, and published in 1752. Newton told the apple story to Stukeley, who relayed it as such:
“After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees…he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself…”
The Royal Society has made the manuscript available …
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/01/newtons-apple-the-real-story.php
As for the scientific method, Stephen Toulmin probably doesn’t have the last word, but for more see:
http://chronicle.com/article/Cosmology-Cambridge-Style-/124568/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
The seperation of church and state is an ideas that can only be found in a personal letter written by Thomas Jefferson to a personal friend. Jefferson was stating that he was against the idea of a national church such as the church of England. It is not actually written as a part of the constitution. Jefferson himself was a chrisitan as evident by his creation of the Jeffersonian Bible which is a New Testament that contains only the words of Jesus Christ.
OK frost. So these white slave’s descendants would have had to sit in the back of the bus or use a separate sink? Are you trying to downplay your racist attitude?
There are a couple of entries in this list that are questionable at best. Firstly, Van Gogh did cut his ear off (well part of it) after threatening Gauguin with a razor. He gave the piece of his ear to a hooker for safe keeping.
Secondly, the peppered moths did evolve to be darker, as far as I know. There are always lighter and darker moths, but the darker ones dominated the population when their environment changed. (This is only to the best of my knowledge, however, I’m not a biologist)
And the first post about primary colours is not quite correct either. The RYB colour scheme does represent the primary colours, so does the CMYK scheme, and, incidentally, so does the red green blue colour scheme, or RGB. It depends what you are doing and how the colours are being expressed that tends to dictate what primary colours are correct.
I really hate all the religious morons on here. You suck.
This list, and some of the comments on it, perpetrates mythologies of its own.
Grodor said: “The scientific method works fine for hard science, just not social science. People just want to publish their own beliefs and select a sample that will produce those results.”
It is true that social science researchers use methods other than the scientific one to gain knowledge, but it is not true that this is “science” or that it has the same standing as research conducted using the scientific model of inquiry.
Models of reality proposed on the basis of the descriptive synthesis of data is interpretive, not scientific. This is useful in generating hypotheses which can be subjected to the scientific method but that is all. To be ranked as real science the model must be proposed in such a way that it can be potentially falsified. To be supported as “scientific truth” it must be confirmed by studies which attempt to do that. If this cannot be done then the knowledge is merely speculative and assumptive, not scientific.
Examples of speculative assumptive models include the early psychiatric models proposed by Freud and Adler. According to the philosopers of science (Karl Popper, for example) they rate as “religion or ideology”, not science. Modern behavioral medicine attempts to be based entirely on evidence derived from the scientific method.
why are you saying that lies are ok? above you put: Why It Shouldn’t Change? yet there is no reason to lie, it is just about The Peppper Moth! it said : Middle school students don’t really need to grasp the complexities of natural selection but why shouldn’t they, it is a pointless lie. And you say that they should carry on lying because there no need for them to know…
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please share! anyone have better ones? Top Ten Lies Your Teachers Told You in School | DegreeScout http://bit.ly/95CEwp
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my fifth grade teach told us that we were born with small tails, that the doctors removed after birth. I believed that for quite some time, which makes me really question the state of our teachers. t
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What the hell is this crap? They only had a couple correct points. lol
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I get pretty angry about this sort of thing as well. Kids at that young of an age can process information so well that it really does them a disservice to give a ‘cute’ answer about thunder instead of simply telling them the truth. Even if someone is not going to give them a huge breakdown of all the science involved then they could certainly explain parts of the truth. The children would ponder whatever information they received as well children as do and be better off because of it. Moreover if a teacher doesn’t know the correct answer to a question then they should always admit that they don’t know and tell the student that they will find out for them if possible. They should also reinforce the notion that it is okay to not know some things and that it is usually a great idea to do ‘research’ to find out about things that you do not know about. So many people grow up thinking that if they can’t remember something or if they can’t figure something out then they are stupid or failures at certain subjects when that simply isn’t true. The problem is that these people will give up on their dreams because these perceived failures indicate they don’t have a shot in hell at achieving them. Sure some people might need spend more time on some material before they gain as comprehensive an understanding of it as others in their class. This slower acquisition of knowledge doesn’t make these people dumb, it ultimately makes them better educated which was the goal in the first place. If it takes someone a year to learn calculus as opposed to a quarter then they shouldn’t feel like failures, they should feel happy that they fucking learned calculus. The people who really fail are those who give up and sadly most of those people only give up because they are discouraged from making further efforts. I don’t think people would feel that negatively about themselves or others in regards to academic ‘failure’ if our education system didn’t instill that sort of mentality into children in the first place. Children of all ages should know that it is okay to mess up and it is great to keep trying to learn things that they don’t understand as quickly as other kids.
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I had a teacher tell me that mahogany was more dense than iron. I asked why did it float and was told it doesn’t. I explained that what she was talking about was ironwood not mahogany. Then she pulled my desk out in the hallway and made me sit there until the end of class.
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Bull.
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