25 Things We Learned In School But Have Since Been Disproven
Information can evolve as new evidence emerges; it’s a fundamental aspect of the scientific process. As our understanding of the world deepens, we need to revise what we know. This also implies that certain knowledge acquired in school may become outdated in our lifetimes, as discussed by members of the r/ask online community in a popular thread. Below, we’ve gathered some of these users’ reflections on the facts that have changed since their school days. Take a look to explore what they have to share.
#1
“High school’s gonna be the best four years of your life!”
Reader, it was not the best four years of my life
#2 Animals don’t use tools.
#3 That microwaves kill all the nutrients in food.
Bored Fox : Does anyone know where this myth started? I heard it was some chef who was trying to get people in his restaurant. :D
Ace : It’s been around for decades in one form or another, most probably originated from the fact that they use radiation, and radiation is “bad”, right? More recent social media platforms and the tendency of some to believe any old conspiracy theory keeps the myth alive.
Comedy Clumbers : Could have been (heavy sigh) my mother. She made us LEAVE THE ROOM until it dinged. She might still do this, but I’m enforcing LC for my own mental health, so can’t say for sure.
#4 That the English language has comprehensive and consistent rules.
#5 Pluto being a planet
#6 You can’t carry a calculator all day!
#7 Grade school in the US, mid 1970s: We will be converting to the metric system soon.
#8
A lot of things that we learned about dinosaurs when I was in elementary school turned out to be wrong. We thought they were scaly and reptilian, turns out a lot of them had feathers, and were very brightly colored, and were more like birds in a lot of ways than reptiles. Dinosaurs we thought existed like brontosaurus, turned out to not have actually existed.
Just everything dinosaur. Everything dinosaur was wrong.
#9 Basically any idea promoted by the D.A.R.E campaign
#10 Blood is blue until it is oxidized
#11 If you learn well, you`ll get a good job and will have a nice future. Total BS.
#12 My teachers used to say “Video games will make you braindead.” Turns out video games were all about solving puzzles and problem solving and ended up increasing the cognitive abilities and critical thinking skills for children from a young age.
#13 Nerves can’t regenerate and electron orbitals are circles. Basically, science keeps getting better and I had no idea these had changed for a long time.
#14 That you have to do lots of extra curricular activities, sports, and volunteer work just to get into any colleg. Joke’s on them. I went to college 10 years after high school so none of it mattered.
#15 1970’s elementary school – Global Cooling was in process. We would be out of oil by the end of the 80’s
#16 Trickle down economics
#17 Areas of taste on the human tongue
#18 Gen X here. We’ll run out of oil by 2000.
#19 That Christopher Columbus discovered America. Just ask native Americans about this one.
#20 Cracking your knuckles will cause arthritis, plus basically everything in history class.
#21 The food pyramid
#22 That your permanent record really does follow You for Life a bunch of Bologna
#23 While I was in college biology our teacher said she was forced to teach us that cell walls were rigid because that’s what the text book said but, she told us, it was not true–the phospho-lipid cell wall had just been discovered. So we learned it wrong and corrected all at the same time.
#24 Just about everything they taught about nutrition was a lie… which is kinda insane when you think about it. An entire generation who doesn’t know how food works in your body
#25 Earth had 4 oceans. The 5th ocean plot twist was revealed to me in my late 30s. I didn’t know, guys!! Could someone please update Gen X when this stuff happens? There should at least be a weekly memo or something. We are all over here failing easy trivia questions because no one told us that there was a 5th damn ocean. ?
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.
