Article August 11, 1934 Issue

Correcting False Beliefs

[Written Especially for Children]

TILLIE C. VAN DER VOORT

The writer recalls that there was once a little girl, less than five years old, who believed that the earth was flat and extended right out to the end of space. She thought that the sky was an enormous dome which fitted over the earth like a bowl turned upside down on a plate. She hoped some day, after she grew up, to travel to the very edge of the world, so that she could see how the earth and sky were fitted so neatly together.

One noontime, while she was playing in front of her home, some school children went by, and she overheard one of them say that the sun was more than three hundred thousand times as big as the earth. She wondered about this a while, then began to laugh, for it sounded to her like a very absurd thing to say. "Why," she said to herself, "can't he see that there isn't enough sky to hold a sun bigger than the earth?"

She ran indoors and told her mother of the statement the little boy had made; and, of course, right then she was given her first lesson in geography and astronomy. In a very short time her wrong thought-picture of the universe vanished, and was replaced by the correct thought about it.

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