A malleable fact isn't a fact, it's an opinion.
So it feels like much of early education has been a big bag of opinions heeped onto generations prior.
No wonder those standardized tests were such a mess.
On the flip side of that thought, life, and science evolve, so facts do change.
Once you're out in the real world, so much has to be relearned and disproven.
Who can keep up?
It feels like we should be paid as participants in the school of life.
So let's do some relearning.
Redditor yepvaishz wanted to hear about the times we've learned some new things about some old things, so they asked:
"What was a fact taught to you in school that ended up being disproven during your lifetime?"
The amount of lies we were fed in school is too high to count.
So let's sift through memory lane and make some corrections.
RECOUNT!
My Work Animation GIF by AndiGiphy"From an educational filmstrip: 'Saturn has four beautiful rings...' The Voyager photos of the thousands of rings had come in like a week before we watched this."
robaato72
Never say Never
" Germany would never reunite. The French would never allow it."
Powerful-Ad9392
"I'm German and I was 11 when it happened. We housed our East German part of the family for a couple of weeks when they came over to visit. My cousin was my age and had never been shopping (just wandering around a mall looking at things) and my uncle begged my dad to take him to a hardware store just to see what stuff was available."
"Just three months before the wall fell, my dad had been over to visit them, just by himself, saying it was too dangerous for us kids (and I imagine it would have been a hassle getting permission for the whole family). It was such a wonderful time. A peaceful revolution without a single gunshot."
"I'll never forget the moment when the people who had fled to the German embassy in Prague got told they were allowed to leave. That collective scream of joy and relief by 4000 people still makes me tear up every time I watch the video. https://youtu.be/Qh9EwNurawE"
best-in-two-galaxies
200 MPH
"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."
ablativeyoyo
"It’s also blew my mind to find out the 'bodies' you see at the site were the hollow spaces where a body once was, filled with plaster, and the hardened ash removed. As a kid I never thought about it I just saw shapes of bodies and thought 'that's a body.'"
Zanzoken814
Bye Kraken
"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."
EarthExile
"I’ve seen the preserved corpses at the Smithsonian. It’s pretty fascinating to think no evidence existed until our lifetime."
UnihornWhale
Crack Away
Sonic 2 Punch GIF by Sonic The HedgehogGiphy"Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis."
panda388
"They just wanted us to stop."
Admiral_Minell
I've cracked for years and probably will for life.
My fingers are still slender.
Diet Lies
Season 7 Nbc GIF by The OfficeGiphy"Food pyramid."
OutrageousEvent
"Of all the facts that have since been disproven, this might be the worst. We have a generation of adults who are getting diabetes and fatty liver disease because of what these people said."
calumin
Bad Illustrations
"Your tongue has different areas for tasting different tastes:sweet on the tip, sour on the sides, bitter in the back, etc. I feel like this was some elaborate prank played on my generation. But I remember seeing this in my elementary school biology textbook. I don’t even think it was disproven, like, they just stopped telling this lie. WTF."
"From what I have read, more like a game of telephone.Study results got slightly distorted, and then changed into a graph which didn’t have meaningful numbers, which lead to an illustration, which got re-purposed. That an illustration got put into textbooks for years and years."
danneedsahobby
Exposure
"Blood is blue until exposed to oxygen."
mwjb86SFW
"This one triggers me. I had an old lady teaching my 6th grade science class that sent me to detention for arguing with her when she said the blood in your veins was blue but red in your arteries. To be fair, I argued with her on a lot of things she was wrong about, but this is the only one that resulted in detention."
"That's the only time I can remember my dad, a chemist, actually go to the school to confront a teacher for being wrong. Incidentally, she also counted off on a test because I said sound was one of the senses. She wanted hearing. I said you sense a taste, you sense a sight, you sense a smell, and you sense a touch, so why don't you sense a sound? That argument lasted several days, but she did give me my points back."
pacer_3iii
The Science of It All
"Neurons can never regenerate. This was from my then-one-year-old anatomy and physiology textbook, and my private, Catholic school actually took - and still takes - its science seriously; we never talked about creationism or the divine influence on our natural world, not to mention our solid AP Physics and AP Chemistry scores. It turns out that that the peripheral neuron system actually can regenerate; as of now, it doesn’t seem that the central nervous system has much in the way of that capability."
Brunt-FCA-285
Jokes on Them
muppets computers GIFGiphy"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."
zerbey
Who knew computers would take over the world?
They seemed just like big cumbersome machines at first.
Now they build and destroy lives and careers.
@WhiteHouse/X
