I vaguely seem to remember a discussion about map projections in sixth grade. I'm not sure if it was a school lesson or something I just stumbled upon in a National Geographic, but there is an important absence from this discussion.
The Mercator projection was not some conspiracy to put North America and Europe at the center of the universe at the expense of oppressed peoples in South America and Africa. In fact, although Africa was fairly well-known, South America was still in the beginning stages of being colonized, while North America had barely been touched—and no one had even heard of Alaska. No, in fact, the Mercator was used for direction: any straight line on the map in any direction was true to traveling in a straight line on Earth. Follow a northwest-to-southeast line on a Mercator map, and you're going southeast. No other flat map projection has this unique feature. Of course, because the Earth is round, and the points of longitude get closer together at the polls, Mercator's projection makes them look bigger and places near the equator look smaller. Antarctica looks bigger than any other continent. Those pesky penguins must have hatched it up!
Second, back in the 90s and early 2000s, I expressly remember the maps in our classrooms. There were a couple of Mercators, but most of them were some other projection. Mollweide was an equal-area projection (that's the oval one). Robinson was a compromise.
