School experiences are too varied for such a site to exist. Examples:

Climate change was universally agreed upon to exist and be caused by people 30 years ago. For some reason it no longer appears to be.

Leif Erikson was taught to us back then but you’ll find people today that celebrate Columbus.

''You won't have a calculator in your pocket all the time!''

People believe enough random bullshit to tickle their memories with their classics list.

I didn't graduate highschool though

The book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen goes a long way to accomplish this. At least it did for me.

I think the biggest one that was drilled into us constantly, especially about WW2 and Nazis was

“ Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned To Repeat It”

This was a load of shit as evidenced by what is going on in the USA right now and other parts of the world. The real lesson should have been to push back the second a nazi takes an inch as they will take more if you play the nice and tolerate. Not everyone is well intentioned.

That quote is being proven true right now though?
People don't really remember what happened with the nazis. Most of the people who actually lived that past are dead now.
And the vast mojority of people lack enough empathy/understanding to be able to 'walk a mile in their shoes' as it were and extrapolate the horrors from the most readily available histories.
I had this really awesome kind of angry and nihilistic history teacher in H.S. who offered an elective course that studied the repeated patterns through history leading up to genocide. It covered Armenia, Rwanda, and the Holocaust.
I don't know if it was just the fact that we looked at the repeated overlaps between human behavior vs just memorizing historical events, but if more people took a course like Crimes against Humanity maybe they would learn to spot those clear patterns of human behavior that somehow happen over and over again without anyone noticing.
push back the second a nazi takes an inch as they will take more if you play the nice and tolerate. Not everyone is well intentioned.
Yep, the Holocaust didn't happen overnight. It always starts as a slow slide into genocide, but once it picks up steam it turns into an avalanche. It drives me nuts that people keep pretending we should be entertaining any of this as just normal politics. The reaching across the aisle bullshit was insane a year ago (and really 10 years ago), but at this point it is literally enabling this shit to happen. You're a collaborator.

USA is a democracy

1987 Edison was a genius and invented everything, Turns out he was actually the Elon Musk of his time.

Don't get me started. He did not invent the lightbulb. Did he "perfect" it? Maybe? But only after trial and error of 100's of filaments including human hair.
Edison being a giant dick of a patent troll is one of the main reasons Hollywood exists. I'm not sure Musk has anything that impactful on his resume.
- I'd say PayPal was a pretty big deal but I'm not sure what his level of involvement was
- Intellectual jokes like this are one of the reasons I'm on Lemmy.
AND he electrocuted an elephant.
- He was trying to prove that electricity was dangerous. Even at the time though a lot of people pointed out that the voltage used was not the voltage used in mains electrics so it was basically a pointless thing to do and people quite upset about the elephant. He did receive a fair amount of bad press for it.

The United States is a constitutional Republic/democracy with 3 co-equal branches of government...

I mean it technically still is. de jure at least
It's like this:

We need the "under an fascist hybrid regime with a judicial junta (aka: "supreme court") and a mostly rubber-stamp legislature filled with cultists" to the label in the USA page.
Edit: Worth reading the discussion page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:United_States
- I'm not sure that Russia really counts as anything other than an actual dictatorship. It's not like there's a free and open choice and people just keep voting against their own interests like in the US, the elections are of course rigged and there are no opponents anyway. Anyone that might stand against him gets assassinated.
  Of course Trump probably will try and go that route as well, but he hasn't done it yet, and he hasn't consolidated his power there are still people in positions of some authority pushing back against him.
- it's all just fascism with chrome plating and a spoiler

Work hard and you will be rewarded and taken care of. LOLLLLLLLLLL.

"What you were taught
"Flu shots give you the flu"

What we know now
A common misconception...

Updated understanding emerged around 2020"

Updated for whom? Anti-vaccine idiots?

They were just a little wrong, “Flu shots give you a flu”.
There are 2 types of these shots essentially:
the pathogen is put into some other thing that creates stuff that fights against said pathogen. That stuff is then extracted and given in the shot.
the pathogen itself is processed and given to you. This causes your body to make stuff that fights against the pathogens. Your body then vaguely remembers how the pathogen felt and hence, increases the reaction your body does to any attack from a similar pathogen that comes the next time. This is the one corresponding to the above quote.
Of course, if your immune system is weak, the processed pathogen can be enough to give you quite a bit of a problem.
- I know there are different types of vaccines, but really, experience should be enough to prove this assumption wrong many times over. I guess people just don't get their flu shots...
Well some shots do work like that. But you usually don't get symptoms unless you are immunocompromised and it's a live (but weakened) version of the virus.

I don't care if it's wrong, Marilyn Manson had his ribs removed so he could blow himself

He responded to this rumor in his autobiography saying "If I really got my ribs removed, I would have been busy sucking my own dick on The Wonder Years instead of chasing Winnie Cooper. Plus, who really has time to be killing puppies when you can be sucking your own dick? I think I'm gonna call the surgeon in the morning"
- Brian Warner can fuck right off tho
They taught you that in school?
- I learned that in middle school. It was from a kid on the bus but it was still middle school.
- lololol
Believe it or not, this rumor actually stretches all the way back to dianunzio from Italy in the 1940s.
I still want whoever decided that "I before E except after C" should be taught to children locked up. Im almost 50, and I still spell "their" wrong if I dont concentrate.
- "I before E, except after C, or when sounded as 'ay,' like in 'Neighbour' and 'Weigh.'"
  ...Or when running a feisty heist with their weird, foreign neighbour, Keith.
- "I before E exthept after 'th'" should do the trick. Just have to remember that the last part is pronounced "thee".
Oh so we graduated almost at the same time it seems.

I went through the two websites posted here for graduation year 2008. The only incorrect thing I was taught that I still believed was:

"Learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) determine how you best learn"

False. Huh.

My brother had to do that for the military at one point. I don't know what the point was because apparently nothing ever came of it they just did the tests got their results and then apparently everyone forgot about it, because everyone carried on getting trained in exactly the same manner anyway.
- Oh yeah it never was applied. I just remember one of my high school English (Language Arts) teachers talking about it.
I just picked up a book on this! There is, of course, an incredibly racist history to the use of these concepts.
You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner
Those were disproven long before then. They are interesting to think about as different sensory inputs to engage, but are complete nonsense as far as learning styles.
- ...So what learning styles are there?

I guess the big one for me is the whole Mozart for babies thing. It wasn't Mozart's music making babies and young children smarter, it was a combination of more affluent parents or at least parents with college plus educations having time and income to spend on enrichment activities.

Oh, thanks! That makes so much more sense!
On a tangential note, I find hilarious which songs my toddler picks up and which ones are immediately forgotten. Somehow APT and Hey Jude are the shit, most of everything else doesn’t stick. Wonder why…
- I think it's just songs with the right kind of beat that they like. My sister's kid is very partial to Uptown Girl, of course she doesn't know the lyrics but she can sort of sing the tune. It took me a while to work out what it was.
Yeah, but that doesn't stop baby toy markers from including that shit in every product

The fact that we thought Pluto was a planet seemed absolutely insane at the time but none of the kids could question the adult in the room when the stupid rock is literally not even staying in its own lane

That's a definitional question, though, is it not? I don't think any facts actually changed.
- Yes. Ceres was considered a planet when discovered in 1801 and around the 1950s began to be classified as an asteroid. It is now considered a dwarf planet like Pluto. It's the largest thing in the asteroid belt but is still sort of planet shaped.
- Okay then maybe the electron shells model of an atom. That was taught as fact and it's definitely not true even though it's still useful
It doesn't help that planet has such an incredibly vague definition. Earth is a planet but so is Jupiter but other than being spherical they don't have anything in common. In terms of similarities, Pluto is much more like Earth then Jupiter is like Earth, at least Pluto has a solid surface.
- It's not vague at all. It's a classification that needs to meet three criteria. The lack of this classification is why it was taught that pluto was a planet, but once these things were formalized in 2006 it became clear that pluto no longer met the criteria.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet

Inspired by xkcd, this is what I do:

https://xkcd.com/843

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
The history list was most interesting in my opinion.
Obligatory "there’s a xkcd for anything, isn’t it?"

Class of 2003.

Food wheel was taught in elementary school. As were the taste bud "zones" and the American Dream.

We had the Food Pyramid here in Canada, which is very similarly a lie pushed by the dairy and grain industries and not linked to any real health benefits.
- I now refer to the [https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/healthy-eating-pyramid/](Harvard food pyramid) that seems to be meaningful

That whole "got milk" campaign was a load of bullshit.

It turns out only about 30% of the global human population is able to even digest milk.

That, and most traditional dairy consuming European cultures never actually drank milk. They made cheese and butter, then poured the remainder in the pig trough to turn those calories into pork.
- They made cheese and butter
  The Nuer (a cattle-herding people from Sudan) would pour milk into gourds and add cow urine and leave it in the sun for months. I love eating food from around the world but that is one thing I would pass on. They never drank milk, but if they needed liquid calories they would poke a hole in a cow and drink some of their blood.
- Absolutely. Mainly a problem of conservation of raw milk.
- The most delicious of calories.
man i cant even have my mocha frap without oat milk
Yeah but those avacadoes...

Fruit and vegetables being separate categories: Fruits are actually a type of vegetable. Additionally cucumbers are melons.

Cyan being a light blue: It is actually 50% green.

Simple machines are fundamental: They completely ignore compliant mechanisms and aren't atomic. Actually atomic mechanisms would be defined by the type of force, the shape, and the compliance.

The only form of Socialism is Marxism and Communism and Capitalism means markets: Look up Mutualism or Syndicalism.

Basically everything with pop psychology.

I am sure there are more, but these were just top of my head.

What high school did you go to that they were discussing Marxism and communism. Most schools don't really get that advanced and don't go much beyond teaching about the major wars.

Rome didn't have special rooms for people to vomit in, then resume feasting.

Soviet blocking brigades weren't machine gun nests set up to mow down retreating soviet soldiers.

Vietnam had a regular army, it wasn't entirely a guerrilla force.

Vietnam had a regular army, it wasn’t entirely a guerrilla force.
Did they not teach that North Vietnam (and therefore the NVA) existed?
- Kind of. That's not really reconciled with the l general impression that the US won every single battle, and couldn't find any more enemies to fight, because the Vietnamese would run away and hide in the woods or among the locals and the US only lost the war at home.
- Haha, not really.
Rome didn't have special rooms for people to vomit in, then resume feasting.
This is more like not being taught anything other than that they had "vomitoriums," without being told what they were. Vomitoriums existed. They still exist, too. It just means a large opening or passageway. Like the entrance/exit to the colluseum.
- No, they literally taught that the romans feasted so much they had special rooms for vomiting in. One of my aunts was incredulous that it was no longer taught, and insisted she had been to rome and saw the vomitoria, and remains convinced that it's just some new theory by some fringe historian.

https://www.schoolmyths.com/

It’s a collaborative site.

I like it, though there wasn't a single one of the false facts that I was taught in schools.
"Dinosaurs shed their skin all at once like snakes"
"Girls are naturally not as good at math as boys"
I don't mean to be rude, but If this was taught in your school, everyone around you is probably a moron.
- Yeah, the concept is nice, but it tells me that the Big Bang doesn't explain what happened before it (the leading hypothesis is that the Big Bang started time, so there is no "before") and sources a Wikipedia article on spiders. Then, it cites the common myth about Daddy Longlegs being highly venomous, says that that wasn't dispelled until 2020, and then cites a fucking BuzzFeed listicle.
- Yeah I didn't get taught any of the stuff mentioned for me either.
  One thing I did notice that wasn't mentioned was the tongue map, that I was taught about in the 90's - you know the one that said that your tongue has different areas for detecting different kinds of tastes - sweet at the front tip, sour at the back, that kind of thing. All bullshit.
- Yeah I think that the "you have to discharge your batteries entirely before charging them" would be a better fit, even though it wasn't false at the time, but the technology changed
- "Planet X (Planet 9) exists and explains gravitational pull"
  Weird conspiracy theories were not taught at my school.
  Also:
  In 2017, a photograph appeared to prove that Amelia Earhart survived her plane crash and was taken prisoner by the Japanese. However, it was later proven that the photo was taken two years before her disappearance, leaving the mystery unsolved.
  Updated understanding emerged around 2010
  The updated understanding emerged 7 years before the photo appeared?
  This is why websites need downvotes.
- Where did you go to school? I've never heard of either of those before.
IMO, that site needs more cold war propaganda myths.
For example:
Myth: The US won WWII
Truth: The biggest battles of the last few years of WWII were between Germany and the USSR, and the USSR won, pushing the German army back to Berlin.
--
Myth: Unions are communism, and therefore bad.
Truth: It is thanks to Unions that we work 8 hour days instead of 12 hour days, and that we have a 2 day weekend. They're an essential part of balancing the power of the rich against the power of the workers.
--
Myth: Unions hold back the most skilled, so if you're skilled or smart you shouldn't be in a union.
Truth: The best actors in the world are members of SAG-AFTRA. They negotiate deals where they make tens of millions per movie. The union doesn't hold them back. It just means that when the film studios try to screw over the less powerful actors and the union votes to strike, the rich and powerful actors need to do their part to help the less powerful actors out.
Cool but flawed website.
Earlier times dont include myths that are on later years.
There is no overlap in myths between 1990 and 1970-80 but there is with the myths of the 60s, so we stopped teaching it for 20 years and then went back to it?
"Sugar causes hyperactivity in children" is mentioned to have been corrected around 1995 but stops making the list from 1980 onward. I have heard it after 95 but not from school.
I wanna recommend it to others but i cant in this state.
Just put in 2010 and most of everything it said is incredibly obvious. Plus some of the dates of updated sources seem really incorrect. For example, one of them is it is a myth that most oxygen comes from trees, but I very distinctly remember my math teacher of all people saying in 2006 or 2007 that when he was in school he corrected people that it's mostly from plankton. And even if I'm misremembering this, he definitely said something about it being from plankton in those years, but it says the updated sources are from 2020.
It says that it is a myth that the big bang theory explains where the universe came from but in 2020 we found out it doesn't explain what came before. Like... No? That's always been what it is. Sure, it's always been a Christian talking point to sort of say that, but then why say 2020?
But I guess it's hard to really gauge what should and shouldn't be included. I remember my 5th grade teacher telling me that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. I don't really remember exactly what all she said and if she got deeper into Lost Cause rhetoric than that, but she definitely said Lee was a "good man."
- What you were taught
  "Mobile phones will never replace desktop computers"
  What we know now
  Mobile devices became the primary computing platform for billions of people worldwide.
  That isn't a response to the initial statement at all, which is very much an opinion or prediction rather than any claim to be a fact. I'm suddenly feeling pretty sceptical about this website.
Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet due to not clearing its orbital path.
Why would they just lie about Pluto like that?
Pluto4Lyf
- That's messed up!
- It's in fact a teenager planet and it doesn't clean his room. Once it does it will be bumped back to planet.
  We're doing this for his own good.
  🤣🤣🤣🤣
- Part of the reason Pluto's classification hit so hard in the US is that it's the only 'planet' ever discovered by an USian astronomer. That national pride made the 2006 decision sting more than elsewhere. Some of the top figures from the AAS even challenged the legitimacy of the decision afterwards.
  US pride, again.
Years since graduation:
Oh fuck this site!
Goddamn I'm old
Both 1960 and 2020 are showing the same 6 facts, and the facts shown were debunked years before 2020
Cool site but sadly the link for "Learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) determine how you best learn" being debunked is both dead and missing from archive.org
I'd really like to know more since I've very recently been learning about very similar processing modalities for ADHD brains
Still, cool site and resource!

Left brain/right brain pseudoscience

It goes well with "we only use 15% of our brains". Oh, OK, let's remove 85% of your brain and see how things go.

Alpha wolf is a lie.

A short list of things you didn't realize were false, stolen from the most recent episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast (on Intellectual Humility, Sept 14 2025):

"The original 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds lead to a mass panic." -- It did not. However, rumors of a panic spread via newspaper op-eds about how it was a bad idea to get your news through any other medium besides newspapers. Citation: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html
"You can boil a frog in a pot by gradually raising the temperature of the water." -- This doesn't work; frogs just jump out when they get uncomfortable. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
"Lemmings march off cliffs to their deaths because they blindly follow one another." -- They don't. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions
- "...but I saw it in a Disney documentary!" -- Nope. Turns out the filmmakers paid local kids to capture a bunch of lemmings, spin them around to make them dizzy, then manually threw them off cliffs and filmed it. Citation: https://hyperallergic.com/545742/white-wilderness-disney-nature-documentary/

I actually learned the lemmings thing from the windows 95 era PC game "Lemmings". This is also how I learned that lemmings have green hair!
- PC game “Lemmings”
  Best game of all time IMHO. "I'll just try one more level" followed by the sunrise.
- Yeah I saw lemmings die all the time growing up!!
- fun fact, lemmings was developed by a little studio called DMA designs, which later changed name to Rockstar North, and is nowadays most known for the GTA games.
- They are skilled with bricklaying and mining tools too ⛏️
- Let's go! Door creaks
TIL Lemmings are an actual creature and not just from the PC game Lemmings! I'm guessing that's why it's named "Lemmy" and then has a logo of a rodent. I just thought it was a random name and a drawing of a mouse this whole time.
I thought everyone knew the lemmings thing was made up. But it's become a bit of a meme nonetheless.
- More extracts from that same podcast:
  In each case, right up until the moment I received evidence to the contrary, all this misinformation, these supposed facts, felt true to me. I had believed them for decades and I had accepted them in part because they seemed to confirm all sorts of other ideas and opinions floating around in my mind. Plus they would have been great ways to illustrate complicated concepts, if not for the pesky fact that they were, in fact, not facts.
  That's one of the reasons why common misconceptions and false beliefs like these spread from conversation to conversation and survive from generation to generation and become anecdotal currency in our marketplace of ideas. They confirm our assumptions and validate our opinions and, thus, they raise few skeptical alarms. They make sense and they help us make sense of other things.
- I don't think there's a time when everyone knows something
The War of the Worlds broadcast didn't cause mass hysteria, but it did cause some people to go outside and shoot at the nearest water tower.
What about the BBc documentary with the spaghetti trees?
On the lemmings one, have you never seen hexbear?

The mitochondria better still be the power house of the cell. Or we are going to flip some tables and burn the place down.

See, I was told that too, but no one bothered to explain what that means. I still have no idea what that actually means. What is a powerhouse?
- A mitochondrion (pl. mitochondria) is an organelle found in the cells of most eukaryotes, such as animals, plants and fungi. Mitochondria have a double membrane structure and use aerobic respiration to generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is used throughout the cell as a source of chemical energy.[2] wickerpedia
  Cells can't use the energy from sugar directly. The mitochondrion turns the sugar into another molecule that other organelles can use for energy.
  Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is a nucleotide triphosphate[2] that provides energy to drive and support many processes in living cells, such as muscle contraction, nerve impulse propagation, and chemical synthesis. Found in all known forms of life, it is often referred to as the "molecular unit of currency" for intracellular energy transfer.[3] John "Wick" Peta
- They were a 1980s superband with Robert Palmer, I think.
- It just means it's the system that turns food molecules and oxygen into energy for the cell. The cell itself doesn't know how to do this which is quite spectacular when you think about it. So if the mitochondria died the cell would die.
- When cells devide there’s a top cell and a bottom cell, the bottom cell is where the powerhouse is generated
No one tell them.
- Oil and gas is the powerhouse of the cell - Exxon Mobile
T H R I L L H O
- Buy me Bonestorm or go to hell!

Five senses; taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing, acceleration, temperature, body configuration, pain, balance, time, hunger....

You are missing CO² chemoception. Our lungs tell us if there is a lot stale air, but not if we are in a pure nitrogen environment.
And interestingly: no sense for wetness.
- Getting the washing off the line...time to play "is it still wet, or just cold"
- Walking/riding in a thin rain coat, the sensation of rain telling your body you're completely soaked, while dry as a bone underneath.
- Facts.
Acceleration, temperature, body configuration (positioning), pain, balance and hunger are all related to touch in one way or another.
Time, however, is legit. Along with emotion. Maybe you could call the 6th sense cognition?
- Proprioception (body config) is actually feedback from the muscles.
  Also they forget or were unaware of the most interesting sense: CO² chemoception. It is how our lungs tell if we need air.
- In theory we can break down the sense of sight into subcomponents, too. It's only the visual cortex that processes those raw inputs into a coherent single perception. We have two eyes but generally only perceive one image, even if the stereoscopic vision gives us a good estimate of distance, and one eye being closed or obscured or blinded fails pretty gracefully into still perceiving a single image.
  We have better low light sensitivity in our color-blind rods but only have color perception from our cones, and only in the center of our visual field, but we don't actually perceive the loss of color in those situations.
  So yeah, someone putting a warm hand on my back might technically set off different nerve sensors for both temperature and touch, but we generally perceive it as a unified "touch" perception.
  Similarly, manipulating vision and sound might very well throw off one's proprioception, because it's all integrated in how it's perceived.
Isn't acceleration just a sense of balance? Like you feel acceleration because the whatever fluid moves in your ears due to acceleration which is the same as balance.
- I was going to say you have a static sense of what orientation you are in, e.g. you can tell standing up Vs lying on your front/back/side without relying on other senses and that feels different to the sensation of moving...
  But thinking about it I guess the orientation sense is just detecting acceleration due to gravity?
- i'd say the somatogravic illusion being a thing kind of proves you right.
- I guess so, but similar to how a lot of taste is actually perceived via smell? I suppose linear and angular acceleration could be two separate senses which encompass the sense of balance.

Most of what I learned about genetics is incorrect as when I graduated we thought DNA ran the show.

We were also wrong about why the USSR fell (not a huge surprise)

Why did we think think the USSR fell? Also DNA does run the show...damn, my genetics knowledge is shit. Apparently we graduated the same year 🤣
- Why did we think think the USSR fell?
  The most common belief was that it fell because Ronald Reagan ordered Gorbachev to "tear down that wall".
- I graduated when people accepted Gaidar’s propositions whole cloth and now we blame Gorbachev a lot more than we did in 2000
  mRNA runs the show

For me it's the regions of the tongue thing. It never made any sense, and a 6 year old with a sugar cube could have disproved it. Yet they taught it in schools for years.

We did test it in school with different substances
I was like "I can mostly still taste it everywhere" and the teacher basically told me I was wrong
- Yes. We did this experiment in school, too!
  I can confirm that a six year old with a sugar cube can at least throw some skepticism at this one.
  I was told I must be doing the experiment wrong.
  I did get a quick preview about education, gullibility and gaslighting on that day.
The idea, to me at least, wasn't that the regions were completely distinct, merely dominant.
- What
- What chicken? Sorry I have no idea what your saying.

The one that immediately springs to mind doesn't exactly fit the criteria, because it wasn't even true at the time that I was taught it in public school in Texas. But my history teacher taught me that no real historian called it the "American Civil War," and that it was correctly called "The War of Northern Aggression." And, of course, although the Confederacy did want to keep slavery legal, their actual central reason for seceding was "states rights."

Like I said, both of those are simply lies. Only propagandists call it "The War of Northern Aggression", and it was always explicitly about slavery.

The sad thing is that I believed and repeated these lies for years after that. Note that, like most people, I didn't have access to the internet to easily check things myself. Since at the time I had zero interest in reading about history, it was difficult to correct my knowledge.

It has demonstrated, to me at least, the importance of keeping propaganda away from children. The more you lie to children, the harder it will be for them to become functioning adults.

“The atomic bombings were necessary” was something we were expected to internalize as an indisputable hard fact, like gravity and oxbow lakes.
- Whereas the actual phrase should be "the atomic bombings were necessary to force an immediate total surrender and scare them damn commies before they could take any credit for the Pacific theatre"
- Is it not just the misinterpretation of the fact that the US wanted to end the war quicker to prevent sending more soldiers into a meatgrinder?
  You can certainly call that "necessary" to prevent further deaths of US soldiers.
Similarly, in the US Northeast, I learned about the civil rights movement as a solved problem, and that slavery was basically the only (and long gone) system of oppression we'd had. "Black and brown people have their equal rights now, carry on!"
I had a college professor, Honors US History, teach us that the Civil War was about trade, an agrarian society against an industrial society. Which makes sense and is true in part, but I wish I had known to bring up the various state letters of secession naming slavery as the #1 concern. LOL, Mississippi's is a doozy.
I was taught it was about states rights, too. In Kentucky, they were less forceful about calling it the "war of northern aggression.
Did you get taught that some slaves liked being slaves because it meant all their needs were met and they didn't have to worry about anything?
- I don't recall specifically being taught that, but I do recall believing that was a fact at the time, so it is very likely that I was taught that in class.
  I wouldn't be surprised if there were a couple of slaves like that, but even so, it's a misleading statement. I actually think that using the truth to lie is a worse sin than just outright lying, because it's easier to mislead more people like that.
The texas schooling system is horrendous.
Most texans are genuinely dumb as shit because of how they've been hamstrung by their "education."
- When I went to grade school, I think it really depended on the local school district. I was lucky enough to grow up in a nice area with well-funded schools, and I have relatively few complaints about the education I received. However, in doing school activities, I had the opportunity to see schools in poorer districts, and there was a distinct difference.
  At the time, I didn't think too much about the difference, except that I didn't feel as safe in some schools.
  But looking back... Now I know why parents always shop around for better school districts, because there are some places where it would have been far more difficult to get a decent education.
  That's my knowledge from many decades ago. Maybe it's gotten worse since then.

In the US, Trump would demand this site be “de-woke-ified” to remove “conservative bias” by having any conservative fact disproven removed from results.

I can think of a few.

That T-Rex' vision wasn't actually based on movement. (Probably)
Feathered dinosaurs are a thing.
What we were taught as the 'reservation' system more closely resembled concentration camps, and indigenous people were given a 'choice' between death marches and war.
That the US military was actually on the wrong side of nearly every civilian movement for greater rights, from suffrage, to labor, and now freedom of speech and immigration.

It's also on the wrong side of mostly if not all left leaning democracies. It prefers dictators over center democracies, and will send CIA dogs after any country that starts drifting left.
Feathered dinosaurs are a thing.
Well, in fairness, kind of.
- “In some paleoartistic reconstructions, you will see furry T. rex,” says Tseng. “We think it’s likely that at least at one point in their lives, they probably had bodies that were partially or completely covered in feathers. … Maybe they were more like modern birds, which are among the most extravagant animals.”
  ~ Jack Tseng, a UC Berkeley vertebrate paleontologist and functional morphologist
If I'm remembering correctly vision is movement based, but animals have lots of ways to deal with it. Humans and other species that can move their eyeballs just like vibrate their eyes. But birds like chickens rely more on head bob I think. Couldn't tell you what kind of muscles a tyranasaur has in its eyes.
Also being wrong on the Internet is the best way to find the right answer. So tell me how I'm wrong.
- I could be wrong, and if I am, it's just an opportunity to learn a new thing. I put what I've read elsewhere in the thread.
  Have a great day.
A bit curious here. How they did prove at first that T-Rex' vision was based in movement and then how they did prove that doesn't?
- Not sure it's provable, really, but the idea for T-Rex having movement-based vision is (if I'm remembering correctly, forgive me as it's been a while) something that came from the Jurassic Park story, and more specifically how frog vision works, since they used frog DNA to birth their dinosaurs.

The very architecture of the Internet (it was a written with a capital I back then) made it impossible to take over, and traffic would naturally route around any damaged links or nodes.

Google and CloudFlare have since proven that sonsabitches with enough money can subvert it completely, and it only takes a few dudes dragging an anchor from a boat to disconnect entire countries for weeks and months.

It took them a long time to get there. As corporate ISPs took over from the government and universities, the Internet got built around a few large pipes rather than several smaller ones. It's cheaper to build and maintain, but more prone to failure.
Some of the redundancy from the old ARPANET is still around in the US. Everywhere else, it mostly got built as above. One ship laying an anchor somewhere they shouldn't has brought entire countries offline.
It still routes around damage, but if all the roads are closed you can't get in or out of somewhere.
[...] the Internet (it was a written with a capital I back then)
Back then, an internet (lower case "i") was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.
The World Wide Web, being a massive collection of computers across the globe that are interconnected, quickly earned the title of "THE Internet" (upper-case "i"), to differentiate it from smaller isolated networks.
"World Wide Web" turned out to be a mouthful to say, so we replaced it with "the Internet" instead. Although most websites still start with "www" to represent their global reach.
Nowadays, we've stopped using the word "internet" to describe smaller networks, so the word mostly just refers to the global network. And as such, if doesn't really matter if you capitalize it or not.
However, I was there when the web became accessible to the public and the nomenclature has stuck, so I always capitalize the Internet when referring to it.
- Back then, an internet (lower case "i") was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.
  That is an intranet, not internet, and is still applicable as a term. You just hear people say LAN more these days.
  "World Wide Web" turned out to be a mouthful to say, so we replaced it with "the Internet" instead. Although most websites still start with "www" to represent their global reach.
  The world wide web was always just one part of the internet, specifically the portion supported by http. Ftp, email, etc existed then as well, but was not part of the www.
- Back then, an internet (lower case "i") was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.
  That's what I was told too, but I never once encountered anybody who used the small-i "internet" term. I heard "network", or "intranet" or often topology-related things like "the token-ring network". For a network of networks, I'd hear "WAN" or "external network" but never "internet". Maybe that's just me, but I suspect that small-i "internet" was never really a term that was widely used, if at all.
Cut cables mostly just slow the internet. Probably very few remaining places without plenty of redundancy.

I did too many drugs in high school. I don't remember a lot.

The US south treated their slaves well. Even in high school, I was like “mmmm you suuuure about that?”

In the era, "spare the rod, spoil the child" was considered good advice. If that's how even loved ones were treated … slaves treated well? Press X to doubt.
- Yeah, think about how many men already get drunk and beat the shit out of their wives. The person they supposedly love the most.
  Now imagine if they had a slave to take it out on instead.
- There's actually a lot of scholarship about how Southern plantation owners developed their child rearing philosophy on a misunderstanding of the Roman patriarchy combined with their newfangled "scientific racism," conflating the discipline expected for both children and slaves.
I was fed the line that NORTHERNERS treated their slaves well.
I have been reading through this book on the matter: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14894629-the-half-has-never-been-told
The descriptions of violence toward slaves is heavily discussed and is quite eye-opening to me, since this is not the version I was taught in school!
Compared to how other slaves were treated around the world, this is relatively true.

https://yourschoolgotwrong.com/

Source (GitHub)

Mobile web design is my passion
- That's on me, I forgot to test this on mobile after making some changes
There needs to be something about so-called "junk DNA" added to this.
I can't say I've ever heard the one about classical music making people "smarter", but it would not surprise me if some music is simply more distracting than others. Most classical music is inoffensive enough to the ears that it's ok to use as background noise, and the lack of lyrics avoids distracting language processing.
What I'd be more curious about though is if there is any significant impact to quality of work during tests/study time/reading time with background noise like classical music versus just having dead silence.

Every subject other than English and Math have tons of things that were wrong, misunderstood, or made up back when I was in school. 😩

We had to write angry letters to our children's school about 5 years ago to get them to stop teaching taste regions. It's really baffling.

I remember being like 7 and trying that out for myself by touching a lemon slice to different parts of my tongue. I think when I realised that it tasted sour regardless of where on my tongue I touched it to was when I first started questioning authority.
- I remember many kids in my schooldays saying the same and being gaslit by the teacher into thinking they tested incorrectly.
- at similar age, a teacher told me there can't be polygon bigger than 360-gon, because that would be a circle. i wasn't of course in a place to fight with her, i just thought "wtf, how dumb is this bitch?"
Wait, that’s not a thing?
My whole life is a lie.

1992 Bumblebees defy aerodynamics !

KETCHUP IS A VEGETABLE!

The "tongues have taste zones" thing is the only thing that comes to mind.

Also "the 5 senses". It depends on how you define "sense" there's at least a dozen to over 20.
- Holy mackerel!
  Humans have a lot more than 5 senses.
  Edit: I had to look it up, because I knew one or two could be more accurately considered multiple (taste zones and such) but I didn't realize just how many! Wow! Thank you.

I think the hardest truth I just learned is that it’s been 31 years since highschool.

The constitution of the united States.

IQ tests!

They are standardized eugenics and should be rethought entirely

Also the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
I agree. A much better test is whether you wear a red MAGA cap.

Ill never accept that Pluto is not a planet! JUSTICE FOR PLUTO

Fun fact :
Part of the reason Pluto's classification hit so hard in the US is that it's the only 'planet' ever discovered by an USian astronomer. That national pride made the 2006 decision sting more than elsewhere. Some of the top figures from the AAS even challenged the legitimacy of the decision afterwards.
- I dunno. I'm American and knew that, didn't care. My ire was simply having 4 decades under my belt of knowing Pluto as the 9th planet.
Yes. The Pluto thing is a huge violation of the "rule of cool".
If there are bigger rocks than Pluto in orbit, we should promote some cool new big space rocks to be new secret bonus planets!
🤏 small planet, hihi 🤏
I have a song for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMoYgKO3dD4
- That link was not the song I expected so here's another song about Pluto

Pluto

Always a planet, fuck scienctists! (Seriously, nerdy chicks are hot, fuck them.")
- A dwarf planet is still a planet
Average cluttered orbital neighborhood fan
Vs
Binary dwarf planet Pluto - Charon system enjoyer
Part of the reason Pluto's classification hit so hard in the US is that it's the only 'planet' ever discovered by an USian astronomer. That national pride made the 2006 decision sting more than elsewhere. Some of the top figures from the AAS even challenged the legitimacy of the decision afterwards.
(I copy-pasted this comment for the third time even though I don't like to do that, but it's important to know where does such reaction come from : partly from pure national pride)
- Interesting, because I saw a looot of Europeans being very emotionally involved in the topic!
- That's interesting because it's completely bullshit.
  Americans don't know SHIT about that lol and have so many other firsts to pick from.

Wash your chicken before cooking. Don't do this, it just spreads salmonella all over your sink.

Ideally you'd wash your sink too.
I thought this wasn't about actually using a sink and water, but rather, using lemon juice to cover the chicken as the enzymes break up the protein and tenderize the meat?

The story of how North and South America were settled by the first humans. What I was taught was that the Bering Sea was frozen at the end of the last ice age, and then glaciers opened up and people migrated southward.

The problem is that the timing is too tight and the migration would have to have happened too quickly. Many native groups have long seen this story as flawed, as well.

This was covered in the book "1491", and at the time of publication, researchers weren't quite sure what model to replace it with. Probably some of the migration was using boats along the west coast rather than going over land. That book is getting pretty old now, though, and I'm not sure if or where things have settled out.

Racial supremacist preferred narratives favour suppressing evidence that Polynesians could navigate larger Pacific before Europeans could navigate Atlantic. But simply artifacts predate the "land bridge theory timing"
- Genetic evidence clearly shows native americans origins are from Siberian people. While there are evidence Polynesians made contact with them before europeans, native americans were already well established for tens of thousands of years before then.

The economy works and real estate is always a good investment. Also, the best thing that can happen to a nation is to be defeated by the US, because the US will then rebuild their infrastructure. The only example that teacher would cite was Japan.

Fm radio travels in waves while am radio travels in beams. This wasn't a science teacher though. This was a media teacher's wisdom.

Fairly, land is always a good investment. Taking out predatory loans to buy land isnt.
The rebuilding thing was a plan specific to WWII. They wanted to avoid the issues that the end of WWI brought to keep another war from happening a couple decades down the line.
- The US also wanted an ally in the area who was into capitalism. Similar to how SK got a lot of support in building their infrastructure, but they went even farther into capitalism. Both countries are really depressed now.
  He was trying to rationalize why Bush II's wars weren't going to be bad for them. In both cases, completely ignoring the huge loss of life that incurred.

Alphas.

White Jesus.

IQ.

9 out of 10 dentists.

Apple a day.

I recently told my mother that I'm probably the most intelligent person she will ever meet while explaining why her conservative beliefs are dumb as shit and she defensively asked what my IQ is...
I was no contact for the past eight years or so and it was at a family reunion that we saw one another.
I don't know my IQ, I'm actually a pretty slow learner, and I have horrible test anxiety. But as a polyglot physicist with a dash of perpetual autodidactic inclinations, I'm pretty well informed and I don't know if intelligence can be measured, but I know it when I see it.
It's funny that conservatives think quick wit and fast words equate to intelligence without ever stopping to think about the substance.
- Objectively speaking, intelligence is considered to be the ability to reason. Following that line, high intelligence would be the ability to reason well.
  However, we humans do well because we specialize. It was discovered early on that we can't do everything. One could say it's our individuality which drives us towards having different proficiencies and the entire chain of schooling would better serve to explore and encourage pursuing such specializations.
  Where the means to cultivate proficiency are lacking, the end result will often be incomplete. That shouldn't mean there is a lack of intelligence, but that it hasn't been developed to its potential. I would say.. the base intelligence remains the same while expectations rise in concert with each own's path of development.
  Life is neither easy nor fair. And opportunities aren't equal. So i often try to remind myself that perspective changes with experience and as such any standard we set ourselves and others to tend to be laced with personal bias.

Um...what's it say about Tylenol?

They sure weren't teaching that an overdose is instakill on our liver.

Feel like a lot of the "myths" are also just because you're not going to teach a 16-year-old about quantum mechanics to explain why table salt exists

Well there are deepening levels of understanding depending on the learner's pre-existing understanding of the world (e.g. matter > atoms > protons/neutrons/electrons > fermions), and there are things that are just plain incorrect, that were assumed to be correct, because science advances (e.g. Pluto is a grey ball of boring nothingness very similar to Mercury).
- Pluto is a grey ball of boring nothingness very similar to Mercury
  It isn't?!
Relevant xkcd
- Relevant Pratchett
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
so what you're saying is that this is ageism. And we are infantilizing individuals irrespective of their experience and actual understanding.
- Never been a big fan of children, but they fucking love me, even if I'm clearly annoyed at the time. I was asking my ex-wife about this mystery. "You don't talk to them like kids, you talk to them like little adults and they respect that."
  She was right! I talk to them like adults that simply don't know as much as I do.

I was taught that Canada has 10 provinces and two territories. That was proven false before I even graduated high school!

Because of Nunavut, or something else?
- Yup. Nunavut in 1999.

The food pyramid for sure. I’m not sure if it was taught outside the US

I went into a deep dive on the matter. Many countries have food pyramids, but they look potentially very different. For a laugh, look up the Italian one, with pizza and pasta at the base! I nowadays refer to the Harvard food pyramid, seems fairly legit to me.
- The Harvard one looks better but I think I’ll be using the Italian one from now on 😂
This one is ongoing. It gets modified a bit whenever some industry or another pays enough, but it's still misleading kids and educators to this day.

Bears sleep for their entire hibernation and recycle their waste.

Bears do not hibernate, they enter Torpor
- Isn't torpor just the scientific term for hibernation, or are they distinct?

They are two genders.

But there are
Woke and fash
Well, mainly, yeah? The vast majority of us fall on one end of the scale or the other. But it is a scale, same as sexuality.

And the website looks like it’s from the year you input

Your work improves the lives of others more than it will improve your own. Which others is determined by politics. Best to spread the improvement around so you can get more of it back from more people.

Or history that was not covered...

Who would be the arbiter of truth in this instance?

Like it's a cool idea, just practically impossible.

Who would be the arbiter of truth in this instance?
I generally settle for panels of scientists. Scientists aren't prone to agreeing on things, but much of what they do agree on is a pretty safe bet.
(Even the stuff in that category that turns out wrong often is subtly wrong, rather than glaringly wrong.)

Nero linguistics programming

On second thought I learned this from some guy WHILE in highscool

Nero
The dude who fiddled as Rome burned?

China is the most populace country.

tbf when I was in school that was true
- That is what the post is a about. Not just facts that were always wrong, but ones that no longer are true

The reallity ist that you create a website with Google and it generate automaticly your complete Curriculum Vitae from Birth to now.

That website is called ChatGPT lmao

No. It is called duckduckgo.com.