The 9 Biggest Lies You Were Taught At School.

School taught many of us a whole lot of interesting and useful stuff.
However, at the same time, it also taught us a bunch of, well, lies  – such as these 10.

The next time your kid comes home from school, telling you they “learned” one of these facts, I suggest you consider getting a private tutor.

9. The Trojan Horse

The myth says that, after failing to breach the walls of Troy, the Greeks devised a “cunning plan” to present a

huge wooden horse to the Trojans as a gift. Of course, since everybody needs something like this, the Trojans happily opened the very same gates that they were guarding yesterday.
That night, the Trojans went to their beds, but oh, the surprise, Greeks came out of the horse and slaughtered the Trojans, thus ending the war.
What’s the truth? Well, Greek historians and writers were good, but they were notorious for embellishing their tales a lot. There is no historical evidence of the Trojan horse, although the Greeks could have used a horse-shaped battering ram to take down the gates of Troy.

8. 13 Original Colonies in America

Why does the American flag has 13 stripes? Well, because there were 13 original colonies. WRONG! There were actually only 12 starting colonies. Delaware was never a separate colony.

When the British took Delaware from the Dutch, the “phantom colony” was switched between Pennsylvania and Maryland for a while. That is, until it came under the ownership of one William Penn (who founded Pennsylvania). Delaware remained a part of Pennsylvania until the Revolutionary War.

7. Christopher Columbus Discovered the Earth is Round 

It’s really amazing how much credit Christopher Columbus receives in the history books. Time to call fraud.
Raise your hand if you believe that people in 1400s thought that Columbus and his ships would fall off the edge of the world. If you did, go back to school. Nobody believed then that the earth was flat. The Greeks, namely Pythagoras, already proposed a theory that the Earth is a globe. And that was, oh 2,000 years before Spain came to be.
The real truth doesn’t favor Columbus, who actually underestimated the size of our planet.

6. Isaac Newton “Discovers Gravity by Having and Apple Fall on His Head

Apparently, the same guy that is credited for a bunch of things, like the visible spectrum, calculus, laws of motion and the speed of sound needed an apple to crash on his head, in order to have an epiphany about gravity. I don’t even dare to ask how he came up with his other discoveries.
We have one John Conduitt to thank for this ridiculous story about Newton and the apple. He was actually very vague about the apple’s role in the discovery as you can see from this quote:
“ Whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (which brought an apple from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but that this power must extend much further”
Hmm, doesn’t say anything about Isaac getting a lump on his head courtesy of an apple.

5. Ben Franklin’s Kite

Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers and the man called “The First American” is often attributed with proving that lighting is electricity.
As the story goes, good Ben, after finally having enough of trying to convince some idiot that lighting is electricity, decided that a small demonstration is in order.
So what does Benjamin do? He runs outside, in the worst storm possible, carrying a kite with an attached metal key to its top.When the kite was hit by a lightening, the charge passed down the string and into the key, and when Franklin touched the key, it let off a spark of static, which somehow allowed him to discover electricity.

There is no real evidence Ben even performed the kite experiment. And even if he did, today we would be learning about how he fried himself.

4. “Honest Abe” was Strongly Against Slavery

Abraham, aka “Honest Abe” Lincoln is hailed in history as a staunch opponent of slavery. He is credited for freeing the slaves in America with his Emancipation Proclamation.
The truth is that his primary  goal was to find a way to make the Union (North) stronger than the Confederate States (South). The Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t really about racial equality. It was a wartime decision:  only the enemy’s slaves were freed.

3. Van Gogh Cuts His Own Ear

Okay, here’s one that you probably heard from your art teacher. Vincent Van Gogh cut off his own ear, probably in a moment of drunken stupor, carefully put it in an envelope, went to the post office and mailed it to his girlfriend. Very romantic, isn’t it.
A much more probable story is that, like all artists of that time, Vincent did get drunk, got into a fisticuffs with his colleague Paul Gauguin about who paints better noses, which ended with Gauguin deftly slicing Van Gogh’s ear with his saber.

2. We Evolved from Apes

I think creationists are going to be jumping from joy when they hear this. Up until the moment they hear that God still didn’t “create a man by his own image”.
Strange and mysterious are the ways of evolution. It’s really amazing how it works: where the stronger, better-adapted species thrive and adept while the weaker one is eliminated. If that had happened with humans and apes then there wouldn’t be any apes left, because we would have outcompeted them.
Much more likely is that there was a common ancestor to humans and the great apes, like gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees, but that at some point, our ancestors evolved in various directions.

1. Thanksgiving (Gasp!)

 I think it’s a good idea to wrap it up by debunking another lie that is firmly entrenched in the American soul. Thanksgiving.

You may have even reenacted this at school. If you were smarter than the other kids, you tried to sabotage the whole “feast”.
The real story has nothing to do with turkeys and gravy, but with plague (which was apparently the biggest European export to America at a time). Before the Pilgrims came, European fishermen and settlers already “gave” Native Americans the plague, killing most of them. The only thing that the Pilgrims did was kick at the already weakened natives and take their food and tools. So there was no party.