contemplating how there were no less than four times in my middle and high school education when I was asked to write on the topic "Athens and Sparta: Compare and Contrast" without it ever coming up that everything we believed about Sparta was wrong and mostly consisted of silly tough guy stereotypes about a city-state that was never very significant and also like 99% of the actual population were serfs who never participated in any of the he-man games except as random victims
we devoted so many units to studying what would have been a kind of silly and irrelevant topic if it were true and then it turns out that we were 0/4 on checking primary sources or applying basic common sense
(but 4/4 on inspiring bumper stickers for lifted F-150s that also have a thin blue line flag and hair-trigger road rage)
