According to the Boston Globe, some 600 schools around the area and across the US have been teaching kids a purposefully distorted, incorrect view of what the planet looks like thats hundreds of years old.
Now public schools in Boston will be receiving new, correct maps because, The world maps that have hung on school walls in Boston and around the country portray North America as larger than Africa (but its not) and Alaska as more mammoth than Mexico (also untrue).
This is what the planet supposedly actually looks like (and no, it has not been squished inward):
The maps in Boston classrooms prior to this new Peters World Map were from 1569, made by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, and apparently presented warped continents and countries enlarged in ways that simply arent true in reality.
The Globe goes on to suggest that perhaps colonialism was the cause of hundreds of years of distorted maps and teaching kids an incorrect view of the planet they live on:
The map exchange is part of the districts effort to decolonize the curriculum within the next three years, said Colin Rose, assistant superintendent in charge of the Boston Public Schools Office of Opportunity and Achievement Gaps. A goal of the office is to eliminate structural bias and inequality within the school system while ensuring that what students learn in the classroom is culturally competent.
Meanwhile, Boston Public Schools just admitted that any child receiving a public education in their district and probably the majority of this country in the past century has not been taught what Earth actually looks like in school.
How crazy is that?
Talk about the literal dumbing down of America