thinking about the part of the Colombus myth that's "everyone said he couldn't do it"
and the thing is
everyone said he couldn't do it, and they were right. the circumference of the Earth was well known and Colombus didn't have enough supplies to make it to Asia. his basis for sailing west wasn't "I think there's land we don't know about in between," it was "I think everyone else is wrong about the size of the Earth and I'm right."
based on all the information available to him at the time, he was setting himself up to run out of fresh water in the middle of the ocean and die along with his whole crew.
there's already been lots of discussion about what a bastard Colombus was--not even qualified by being "of his time," his contemporaries thought he was a bastard and they were Inquisition-era Spaniards--but it's worth pointing out that he wasn't a visionary either. he set out on a suicide mission and got much, much luckier than he deserved.
and you know, it's one thing when education is "lies to children" in the sense of simplifying things, but "Christopher Columbus figured out that the Earth was round but no one believed him until he discovered America--sadly some people are now mad at him for bringing white people to America" isn't a simplification, it's almost completely the opposite of what happened
