6 Things American Schools Teach You About History (That Are Total Bullsh*t)
1. George Washington
What I was taught:
George Washington, as a child, cut down one of his father's cherry trees. When asked if he had done it, he admitted he had, with the phrase "I can not tell a lie." Thus, children of all ages were taught that liars are bad, and we should all be like the father of our country.
George Washington was the first President of the United States, setting the standard by which all future Presidents would be judged.
George Washington had wooden teeth.
These stories are taught to American school kids as young as five, and are considered absolute fact. In fact, the wooden teeth myth is so prevalent, that it's a common punchline in American media that references Washington.
The truth:
First of all, Washington never chopped down that tree, saying "I can not tell a lie." Ironically, that was a complete lie, made up by Mason Locke Weems, one of Washington's first biographers. Weems, a minister, most likely just included this myth to make a bit of profit.
Ok, this one is nit picky, but technically, George Washington was not the first President of the U.S. See, we didn't exactly get governmental structure right the first time around. The first stab produced something called the Articles of Confederation, which saw ten Presidents until it was scrapped, and replaced with the U.S. Constitution, making Washington technically the eleventh President. Some argue, quite fairly, that the first ten don't count, because they were not leaders of an executive branch, like the current POTUS. While that is a very fair point, they still had the title, and they still had some prestige. Yay pedantic writing!
And finally, those wooden teeth. Dental scientists and historians are not quite sure where this myth started, popular belief being someone was misled by how stained and yellowed his actual dentures had become, but the fact is he never had wooden teeth. While it's true he did have several pairs of dentures, wood was just not a material at the time that was used in the production of them.