20 Things We All Learned In School As “Facts” Until Recently Disproven By Science
When we were in school we were taught that that our solar system had 9 planets. But later that theory was proven wrong and now we are taught differently. According to one Reddit thread, there are several similar “facts” we learned in school that have now been proven false. Below we’ve listed some of the popular things listed on the thread that most of us were taught in school which were eventually disproven by science.
#1 Plate tectonics. When I was in the 1st grade I saw a map of the world and I told my teacher that it looks like all the continents used to fit together, but they moved apart. My teacher laughed at me and loudly proclaimed I was an idiot with a wild imagination. Schoolkids laughed. Jokes on them.
#2 That standardized tests help kids learn better. No, no they did not.
#3 That people only use 10% of their brains. I mean some do, but that’s not normal
#4 “You’ll never get a job looking out the window!” I’m an airline pilot.
#5 That Columbus was the first European to step foot in the new world. Once found an old textbook that stated this. This was prior to the discovery of the Viking settlement in Nfld.
#6 Playing with computers is a waste of time and won’t lead to a career. Said to me by a very old, and bitter teacher. 25 years in IT and counting.
#7 When I was a kid, the Giant Squid had never been captured or photographed, and some people talked about it like it was el chupacabra. My little brother always said he’d be the first person to get footage of one. Sadly, it has since become an ordinary animal that we know exists. RIP the Kraken
#8 So many things. The lifetime of facts is shorter than you’d think. Among them:
- You use 10% of your brain (was in a textbook) * Model of the atom * What composes a healthy diet * Various histories from how dinosaurs looked to what life was like in the Middle Ages * Causes of ulcers, poor vision, acne..
#9 Hard work will be noticed and rewarded.
#10 I had a teacher in 4^th grade that would force left handed kids to write with their right hand. She said that it was the normal way to write and would benefit them later in life. (circa, 1974)
#11 Are you intentionally trying to get my generation riled up about Pluto again? Lol
#12 That you’re gonna end up working a minimum wage job if you don’t go to college.
#13 That Christopher Columbus was a great guy and all the natives rose up in celebration when he came. Yea, I don’t teach history that way.
#14 Late 90’s computer class, “we’ll never have terabyte hard drives in our lifetime, or a need for that much data.” Heh, now you can get terabyte Micro SD cards, wild.
#15 The USA is the only free country
#16 Pompeii was buried slowly by falling ash. They pointed out that remnants of people were found, right in the middle of doing things, but didn’t realise this contradicted the burying being slow. It’s now thought that it was buried very quickly by pyroclastic flows – superheated gas travelling over 200mph.
#17 “You won’t always have a calculator in your pocket!”
#18 I was always taught Mississippi’s secession from the union in the civil war was to preserve state’s right to be independent and nothing at all to do with slavery. That Confederate heritage was about family and not racism.
Slavery is mentioned in the very first sentence of the first paragraph of the letter of secession as the primary reason. They decided if they couldn’t own humans anymore it would crash the economy.
#19 Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis.
#20 My f*****g history teacher taught us how great of a president Woodrow Wilson was. I later learned he was a literal white supremacist who admired the KKK and an overall giant racist even for his time.
Shanilou Perera
Shanilou has always loved reading and learning about the world we live in. While she enjoys fictional books and stories just as much, since childhood she was especially fascinated by encyclopaedias and strangely enough, self-help books. As a kid, she spent most of her time consuming as much knowledge as she could get her hands on and could always be found at the library. Now, she still enjoys finding out about all the amazing things that surround us in our day-to-day lives and is blessed to be able to write about them to share with the whole world as a profession.
