Article created by: Saulė Tolstych
When I was in elementary school, teachers told me that Columbus discovered America. When I was in high school - that there are nine planets in the Solar system, including Pluto. After algebra lessons in high school, I knew for sure that Fermat's Last Theorem had no proof...
Do you know what those all have in common? Yes, that's right - some time passed, literally several years, and everything that the teacher said turned out to be untrue. More precisely, not even a lie - just science convincingly refuted everything that was considered an indisputable truth earlier. And I'm not alone here - in this thread in the AskReddit community, many netizens share similar stories from their own school years.
Hard work will be noticed and rewarded.
“You’ll never get a job looking out the window!”
I’m an airline pilot.
That Christopher Columbus was a great guy and all the natives rose up in celebration when he came.
Yea, I don't teach history that way.
Plate tectonics. When I was in the 1st grade I saw a map of the world and I told my teacher that it looks like all the continents used to fit together, but they moved apart.
My teacher laughed at me and loudly proclaimed I was an idiot with a wild imagination.
School kids laughed.
Jokes on them.
"You won't always have a calculator in your pocket!"
That standardized tests help kids learn better. No, no they did not.
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.
I had a teacher in 4^th grade that would force left handed kids to write with their right hand.
she said that it was the normal way to write and would benefit them later in life.
(circa, 1974)
Late 90’s computer class, “we’ll never have terabyte hard drives in our lifetime, or a need for that much data.”
Heh, now you can get terabyte Micro SD cards, wild.
I was always taught Mississippi's secession from the union in the civil war was to preserve state's right to be independent and nothing at all to do with slavery. That Confederate heritage was about family and not racism.
[Slavery is mentioned in the very first sentence of the first paragraph of the letter of secession as the primary reason.](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp) They decided if they couldn't own humans anymore it would crash the economy.
That people only use 10% of their brains. I mean some do, but that’s not normal
Are you intentionally trying to get my generation riled up about Pluto again? Lol
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
The USA is the only free country
Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis.
That Columbus was the first European to step foot in the new world. Once found an old textbook that stated this. This was prior to the discovery of the Viking settlement in Nfld.
That you’re gonna end up working a minimum wage job if you don’t go to college.
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.
The American Civil War wasn't about slavery.
Blood is blue until exposed to oxygen
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.
When my mom graduated high school in 1944, the nuns were teaching that the atom could not be split. I think the Manhattan Project was already extant at the time. Correct me if I'm wrong, I did see Oppenheimer twice.
So many but I’ll start with cold blooded dinosaurs. I was in college when opinions about them changed.
Germany would never reunite. The French would never allow it.
