Mike
Remember sitting in class, wide-eyed, soaking up every interesting fact your teacher said, convinced that these nuggets of wisdom would be eternally irrefutable? Well, hold onto your textbooks, because a stroll down this educational memory lane is about to get bumpy.
A recent viral Reddit thread has become a fascinating time capsule, revealing a collection of “facts” once heralded as the pinnacle of scientific truth, only to be debunked by the relentless march of progress and research. From the dietary pyramid that now seems more like a game of nutritional Jenga, to the Pluto planetary demotion that broke hearts worldwide, this compilation will have you questioning everything you thought was set in stone.
Prepare to have your mind blown as we explore the whimsical world of outdated facts, proving once again that learning is a never-ending journey.
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.
“You won’t have a calculator everywhere you go.”
3.
Trickle down economics.
4.
“If you learn well, you’ll get a good job and will have a nice future.” Total BS.
5.
The food pyramid.
6.
Grade school in the US, mid 1970s: We will be converting to the metric system soon.
7.
Animals don’t use tools.
8.
Areas of taste on the human tongue.
9.
Microwaves kill the nutrients in food.
10.
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.
11.
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.
12.
That your permanent record really does follow you for life a bunch of bologna.
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.
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.
15.
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.
16.
That you have to do lots of extra curricular activities, sports, and volunteer work just to get into any college. Joke’s on them. I went to college 10 years after high school so none of it mattered.
17.
That the English language has comprehensive and consistent rules.
18.
Gen X here.
We’ll run out of oil by 2000.
19.
1970’s elementary school – Global Cooling was in process. We would be out of oil by the end of the 80’s.
20.
Basically any idea promoted by the D.A.R.E campaign.
21.
Pluto being a planet.
22.
That Christopher Columbus discovered America. Just ask native Americans about this one. – Hungry-Performer-363
23.
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.
24.
Blood is blue until it’s oxidized.
25.
That 98% of our genes are unused, a throwback of evolution.
26.
I before E except after C.
27.
Eating fat causes you to get fat.
28.
Cracking your knuckles will cause arthritis, plus basically everything in history class.
29.
That by 1999 all the landfills would be full and we would have to use the Grand Canyon and valleys for our garbage.
30.
Breastfeeding is a form of contraception.
31.
That I really need to know why the author made red doors in his book. – Capital_Bluebird_185
32.
“Junk DNA has no function” frustrated me to no end. It turns out it was never “junk”. It is actually extremely important to tell the rest of the DNA how to be expressed, and it has played a pivotal role in the evolutive process.
I alway remember my high school teacher insisting that it was only useful for paternity testing, despite it having already been more thoroughly studied by then. – VertigoDelight
33.
Every plate I eat should be MAJORITY pasta, rice, bread or some other kind of carb. The rest should be split between dairy, meat and vegetables equally. – According-Goal5204
34.
Mendelian genetics: Eye colour depends on one gene, brown (dominant) and blue (recessive), the rest (grey, green, etc.) is just what happens in the uterus. While this mostly works, multiple genes are playing together. And two blue-eyed parents may still have brown eyed children.
35.
“There’s no such thing as negative numbers. You can’t take 3 apples away from 2 apples.”
Mrs. Adams, my third grade teacher. I don’t know what other lies she taught me that I still believe today, but the idea of it pisses me off.