Everyone knew the Earth is round
Saturday, November 29th, 2008Pick up any decent history book that covers the discovery of America by Columbus and it will clearly tell you that all European navigators of the time were well aware that the Earth was round. Columbus thought he could reach Asia by sailing west when others dared not try, not because he was the only one that knew the Earth was round, but because he miscalculated the size of the Earth as much smaller than it actually was. He thought that Asia would be only 4500 miles to the west instead of the actual distance of around 12,000 miles. The only thing that saved Columbus and his crew from death at sea was that they ran into an unknown continent, a fact which even after three more voyages, Columbus never admitted. Which is why the continent was named after, Amerigo Vespucci and not Columbus.
I am frequently annoyed by the fact that we continually teach young children that Columbus proved that the world is round. I can’t understand why we do this and for the most part never correct it so that many adults also think that Columbus proved the Earth was round.
So I was not happy when my seven year old son came home from his expensive private school with the script to a play he was doing about Columbus and one of the first lines of the play was “Well, everybody knows the Earth is flat. What if we fall off?”. At my wife’s request, I refrained from making a big deal out of this and simply made sure my son knew better.
Our society seems to have little motivation to teach our children that Columbus was a bad navigator who discovered America by dumb luck, and not some scientific visionary who was alone in his knowledge of the Earth true shape. However, there has in recent years been a growing movement, mostly among those who would lean to the left politically, to paint Columbus as a man guilty of crimes against humanity for his treatment of the native Americans. Although the play my son’s class put on portrayed Columbus as a hero, the influence of this line of thinking is present in the foreboding final two lines of the play which take place after Columbus’s crew and the Taino natives agreed to feast together.
Sailor 1: I sure hope this works out all right.
Taino 1: I sure hope this works out all right.
All that being said, I did enjoy seeing my son in the play. Here is a video of it, my son played Sailor #1. He is the only one who memorized his lines and isn’t reading them from a paper.
