Question #231

[weofodthignen]

Were you taught anything in school that turned out to be factually wrong?

Comments

[dubhain]

"Checks and Balances." 'Nuff said.

[arlie]

The biggie was biology, particularly the over-emphasis on genetics, and the complete rejection of inheritance of acquired characteristics - such as a frugal metabolism from mothers whose own mothers were starved while they were in the womb. (The field that studies this ridiculed "impossibility" today is called "epigenetics".)

Other errors were more learned than explicitly taught - if you omit key information, students will draw incorrect conclusions. Thus various areas apparantly had no history or culture until Europeans discovered them. and all the important science and technology was discovered in Europe, except whatever the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians had discovered. (I'm counting Greece as part of Europe here.)

[weofodthignen]

I think if I had been taught anything in physics or chemistry it would probably have been incorrect, but since both were Nuffield, what I learned was mainly about the mayhem uninstructed young teenagers can create in a lab. Our class set records in both subjects for fire evacuations of the building. The one thing I remember that people have been aghast at is the older of our biology teachers saying earnestly that menstruation used to be regarded as a sickness (it was a girls' school so she didn't get a pass on talking about menstruation), and in retrospect, it still is so regarded by some.

[jane_the_brown]

The farthest back piece of misinformation I remember being taught was that we have only five senses and the senses of taste did not include umami because there was only sweet, sour, bitter and salty and nothing else.

I went to a school that assumed universal belief in God among the students, and taught the existence of the Abrahamic God. A great deal of this was taught in music class in the form of hymns. The school went to considerable effort to teach about Jesus separate from God, but because the Jewish students were exempt from instruction about Jesus and got to clatter off into a different classroom when Jesus was going to be mentioned, there was a lot of non-denominational mentions of the God of the Old Testament. I ended up quite confused because I had atheist parents who weren't pushing it very hard, an aunt that was an Anglican nun who believed in living up to her responsibilities as a godmother and then got some instruction at school that was basically Jewish instruction.

A deep current of sexism was taught in my school, boys are stronger than girls, boys are smarter than girls etc.I learned that it was wonderful being a girl and that becoming a woman and getting breasts was something to look forward to that would make you much happier and more confident.

I was in elementary school when I learned that stuff I was learning in school was being taught without nuance, and that the nuances made the truth much more complicated but I didn't learn this at school. I learned it at home.

I learned that Christopher Columbus discovered America at school, and at home that it hadn't been lost in the first place and that scores or tens of thousands of boats got to America before his little fleet did.But I didn't learn what he did to the Taino until much later. My first three years of school presented two versions of aboriginal people in America. They were either savage redskins who scalped people or they were cute papooses. At the beginning of grade three they got rid of all our old readers and brought in new ones and those ones leaned heavily on the tragic elements of the colonial invasion, and the stereotype of the Noble Red Man. It was an improvement. From this I learned to expect that every three or four years the narrative would become so much more complex that it was likely to amount to a retraction.