Red and yellow and pink and green; orange and purple and blue. Well, that is how I was taught to sing a rainbow. My first introduction to the colours that make up a rainbow; not in order but there are seven colours so they got that bit right?

When I joined school we were taught the colours differently: Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain. A mnemonic phrase to help remember the order of the seven colours of the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet.  Great seven colour in the right order and that is how it stayed in my mind throughout the rest of my school days.

Then one day, whilst teacher training, I was asked to look at a rainbow and name the colours; an exercise in critical thinking.  Easy I thought what a waste of time. But when you look you can see six colours. What happened to the seventh colour? Well, it is still there it's just that indigo is blue, not as it happens a distinct colour of its own. So why have generations of children been taught a demonstratable lie?

It dates back to Isaac Newton, Isaac was obsessed with the Bible, to be fair it wasn’t just him, most people in the seventeenth century were. It was practically a legal requirement. Newton knew that seven was a mystical number denoting perfection. Therefore, he was convinced that there must be seven colours in the spectrum, so he simply fixed it to be so.

I found myself asking just how many other lies have I been taught at school.  It turned out that this was not such an easy question to answer. For something to be a definite lie, there has to be a definite answer to the question. I could argue that being told ‘i before e except after c’ was a lie as it is wrong in more cases than it's right. However, it is right in many common words so not really what I was looking for.

Science is the field where things are either right or wrong. So that was the place to start looking. I remember being told that there are three states of matter: Solid, Liquid, and Gas. Nice and simple; although I do remembering asking where does wood fit in (nobody likes an organic chemist). But I now know this to be a lie. There are four observable states in everyday life as Plasma should not be forgotten. But in fact, the answer could be five, seven, or even twenty-two depending on who you ask.

Speaking of five we were taught that the body has five senses: taste, smell, vision, hearing, and touch. Wrong again since there are two more lesser-known senses vestibular and proprioception. The vestibular sense is connected to balance and movement whilst proprioception regards the body's awareness of itself. Some even claim that there are 53 definable senses.

Upon learning that we are a country that happily tells lies to its children and feeling cheated by it you might feel that I became a teacher to set the issues right. Wrong, I was quite happy to go along with the reasoning that education is a refinement process. A process of simplifying subjects to make them easier for children to understand and build on at later stages.

I went into teaching confident I could do this. My Rubicon moment came when I was teaching urban geography to a group of 14-15 year-olds. I was talking about Brazil explaining how favelas are built on the edge of big cities and can be owned by people over generations. They are thought of as slums but in fact, are people’s homes that have been added to and refined over many years. These areas are being cleared to make room for new built housing for multi-occupancy.

I was asked if this is good or bad, I wanted to say bad it is a terrible thing to destroy a family home drive people from their land, leaving whole families homeless. But, I thought no I had better be balanced. So I answered it is good for those who have new high-quality housing but pointed out that the families who are cleared would not be able to afford this housing so it would be bad for them.

Immediately after, I was taken into an office by the Deputy Headteacher; who had been observing this lesson. He was not happy I was told in no uncertain terms that I must give the correct answer to this question; that is favela clearance is a good thing. There is no room in this education system for a nuanced answer you must give the book answer. I wondered if I could deal with this cognitive dissonance betray my values and teach children things I knew to be false. An idea pushed by a government with a vested interest in teaching a skewed view of the world.

I woke up early the next morning and phoned in my resignation. I considered waiting outside the school and beating the shit out of the Deputy Head. But that was just a fantasy in real life I just started to teach adults how to find work. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.