As great as teachers can be, nobody's perfect — and some teachers end up passing down knowledge that's, uh, not very knowledgable.
Redditor u/Educationalplankto recently asked the people of Reddit, "What is a fact that you learned in grade school that has been disproven?" Reading some of these, I'm just happy we have the internet now:
1. "The tastebud zones thing."
2. "Gum doesn’t sit in your system for seven years."
3. "In the early 1980s, we were told that we would soon use the metric system in the US. Still waiting."
4. "Humans are the only animals that use tools."
5. "We were taught that Rosa Parks didn't get up from her seat because 'she just got tired one day' — that the entire action was the spontaneous action of a lone woman."
6. "Back in my day, Pluto was still a planet."
—u/88988988988
7. "That we won't be walking around with a calculator in our pockets."
—u/Need_Bacon
8. "That carrots make your eyesight better. This was in the early '90s."
9. "Blood is blue in your veins and only turns red when you bleed because of oxygen."
10. "The Food Pyramid."
11. "I remember learning that MSG (sodium glutamate) was really bad for you. It was one of those things I heard both at school and in my family, to the point where we wouldn’t buy any product that had MSG in the ingredients. There have been multiple studies showing no evidence of adverse health effects from MSG. There's a subset of people that report hypersensitivity to it — but in double-blind experiments, their symptoms tend not to show up when they don’t know they’ve eaten it. Conversely, their symptoms DO show up when they think they’ve eaten it but haven’t. MSG is literally just salt and glutamate protein, which is separately in just about everything you eat anyway."
—u/Approximatl
12. "You’ll use cursive forever."
—u/CharmyFrog
13. "That men have one less rib than women. 🙄"
—u/LordVolcanon
14. "We had lessons on how to get out of quicksand at school. I have no doubt that the method is valid — but needing to know how to get out of quicksand really isn’t an issue."
15. "Eggs are bad because of cholesterol."
—u/Lucius_Funk
16. "The fact that someone will try to pressure me to smoke or do drugs often. I feel more peer pressured into drinking oat milk or not eating meat than I do doing drugs."
—u/camsterpants
17. "Margarine is better for you than butter."
18. "That frogs don’t feel pain because they don’t have skin like humans do. I think the middle school science teacher who said this was just trying to calm down some upset kiddos during frog dissection day."
19. "We were taught in third grade that Martin Luther King Jr. and his family died from a bomb being thrown through the window of his home after his 'I Have a Dream' speech. A few years later, my mom said something about how he was shot and maybe there was a bomb thrown into his home, but that wasn’t how he died. I told her that’s not what happened; she told me I was wrong."
—u/dog1029
And finally...
20. "I was taught that in college you will spend all of your study time in a library reading and researching using books and reference catalogs — that the internet was evil and full of lies and not a valid resource for academic research."
—u/Begany11
Got your own? See you in the comments!
Note: These entries have been edited for length and clarity.