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Holy Shit - I will never think about Eli Whitney the same again...(Cotton Gin โ> Cott-engine)
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Cotton Gin โ> Cott-engine
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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The number of teachers I had that taught about the cotton gin, not fucking ONE of them mentioned this. Not one provided context. God I hate how we are expected to learn in this country. I don't know if it was bad teachers, ignorant teachers or just overloaded semesters where we couldn't take the time to go over this stuff, but this was why I hated history as a kid. We had to remember all this crap without any context.
Yeah, I wish more teachers knew there is a difference between memorizing and learning. Learning is connecting all the pieces so you have a solid foundation and will never forget. Memorizing is getting ready for a test and then forgetting everything you ever heard afterwards.
our public school systems were designed to make compliant factory workers, not intelligent people capable of critical thought
The best instructors I had were ones who at most used the textbook as a guide, but some didn't bother and had their own path. Public school is a little less flexible than university on doing that.
As for grade school history, we skipped through so much stuff, and major events usually were a paragraph or so, so no way did they cover each thing properly. But how can they really? Imagine trying to teach a section out of Wikipedia (the index at the bottom). You're simply not going to get to most stuff. And all this is assuming great teachers trying their best, when in fact we have a mix of good and bad, and none of them paid well enough to do the best job they can.