(Thread necromancy courtesy of TeMPOraL's comment.)

inclined plane

Here's Feynman criticizing the Brazilian educational system (in the late 1940s and early 1950s), but I get the impression from his writing that he thought this was a widespread problem that was particularly bad in Brazil. (See for instance the stuff about American textbooks later "Surely You're Joking".)

Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. "There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on. The numbers have 'errors' in them -- that is, if you look at them, you think you're looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks about having to correct the experimental errors -- very fine. The trouble is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane, if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball. Therefore this single example of experimental 'results' is obtained from a fake experiment. Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those results!

-- "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", Richard Feynman (p. 217)