30 Facts People Learned In School That Are Now Disproven Because Science Moved Forward
Interview
Facts can and do change as new evidence comes to light—it’s a core part of what science is all about. As we learn more and more about how the world works, we have to update our existing bodies of knowledge.
This does, however, mean that some information that we learned in the classroom can become outdated within our lifetimes, as members of the r/ask online community recently shared in a viral thread. We’ve collected some of these internet users’ insights about what facts have changed since they learned them in school. Scroll down to read what they had to share.
Bored Panda got in touch with the author of the viral thread, redditor u/karatass91. They were kind enough to share a few insights on facts changing over time. You'll find their thoughts as you read on.
This post may include affiliate links.
"High school's gonna be the best four years of your life!"
Reader, it was not the best four years of my life
NPR points out that scientific knowledge is constantly evolving and changing. It's not just completely new facts that are discovered. Researchers also take new evidence into account and then use it to reexamine what we thought we already knew.
"The key is that scientific conclusions don't change on a whim. They change in response to new evidence, new analyses, and new arguments—the sorts of things we can publicly agree (or disagree) about, that we can evaluate together. And scientific conclusions are almost always based on induction, not deduction. That is, science involves drawing inferences from premises to conclusion, where the premises can affect the probability of the conclusions but don't establish them with certainty," NPR explains why we can trust science despite facts changing.
If you learn well, you`ll get a good job and will have a nice future. Total BS.
It's not just about learning well, it's about learning something valuable. And realistically, that isn't (and never has been) a guarantee for a good job and a nice future. But it IS a big stepping stone towards one.
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.
I think they can still be problematic though, because some of them trigger the addiction centres of the brain. So the gameplay cycle literally addicts you to the game like people get addicted to gambling or other things. Like most things, I think moderation is a good thing.
The food pyramid
*climbs the pyramid, and curls up on the chocolate top*
Bored Panda was curious to get the OP's thoughts as to what we could all do to stay up to date with (at least some) of the changes in science. The idea is so that we don't feel like we've fallen too far behind.
"The point here is to find reputable and reliable sources," redditor u/karatass91 said that this lies at the core of good scientific education.
On top of that, they suggested taking on an even more direct approach to education by "establishing online connections with researchers." This way, you could be at the cutting edge of science... at least in the areas that interest you the most.
Animals don't use tools.
Our first cat used the shutter's hook to bang on the window when it was closed and she wanted in.
Grade school in the US, mid 1970s: We will be converting to the metric system soon.
I will not say that the USA is the only country on earth that use the Imperial system. There are others. Like Liberia, Myanmar, and Micronesia. Well over 7 000 000 000 of us use the Metric system.
You mean, 'the parts of Micronesia that the US owns/runs'.
Load More Replies...
Like the UK that uses a mix of imperial and metric, the US does use the metric system in quite a few instances. NASA uses it for everything they make. The Military uses it for distances (1 'click' = one Kilometre), All guns are made using the metric system, but only some calibres are referred to by it (eg. a 9mm handgun). In pharmaceuticals they uses grams. You measure Volts & Kilowatts, megatons, pixels & Megapixels. Your department of commerce uses the metric system as the preferred system, heck, even your currency is a metric system.
Many industries in the US use metric because it is just easier to do business with the rest of the world. That and engineers love the metric system (source I am an engineer).
The U.S. Army switched to metric in the 1950s. The food and pharmaceutical industries around that time too. The auto industry was in the 1970s. Last estimate I saw was that about 80% of U.S. industries use metric "under the hood". They do all their design and production in metric, then slap on an Imperial label at the end for public consumption.
Load More Replies... As a carpenter in the US, I sure do wish that we used the metric system. 11/16, 7/8, 3/32... it stinks.
It stems back from the days before standardized rulers were widely available. If you had something you knew was an inch long, cutting it in half gives you 1/2 inch, cutting those in half give you 1/4, cutting those in half give you 1/8, then 1/16, then 1/32. Same goes for volume measurements. If all you had was a 1 gallon jug, you could divide 1 gal of ale into quarts by splitting it into two halves which weighed the same on a scale, then repeating (4 qt = 1 gal). Divide that in half again to get pints (1 qt = 2 pints). Divide that in half again to get cups (1 pint = 2 cups), etc.
Load More Replies...
Everyone going into science, engineering, chemistry, and medicine uses the metric system.
'... Disproven Because Science Moved Forward'? No, 'disproven' because the US decided to remain stuck in the 1950s.
We (U.S.) got partway in the metric door. Medical community uses it. Our monetary system is decimal based. Grocery goods usually display both systems. Automotive measurements are a mishmash of both. No real reason why the U.S. can't push finalizing metrics. Young people are far more familiar with the system than oldsters. It's time my country dropped Imperial measurements. It's embarrassing!
Come to the U.K., buy a pint of bitter for your six foot tall friend and a 330ml can of Coke for yourself, then go for a drive, careful there’s a 30mph speed limit, stop a petrol station and buy a few litres of petrol, a pint of milk and a 500g box of corn flakes, head to the local garden centre pick up a 40 litre bag of compost, a hundredweight of gravel and a 25 metre hosepipe that’s going to fit on your 3/4” BSP (British Standard Pipe) tap that’s attached to 15mm or 22mm piping. Yeah, that’s a metric s**t ton of mixed measurements.
Tge American government HAS officially adopted it, and uses it. The general public would rather be mules about it.
I was in elementary school and remember the unmitigated disaster it was in class. I can still see my teacher hanging her head in utter frustration as we peppered her with questions like, 'but how does that translate to inches? feet? miles? cups? pounds?'
Australia converted in 1970 while I was in high school, four years after decimal currency. So I am conversant in both systems. Frankly, metric is SO much easier AND makes much more sense. EG: a kilometre is 1000 metres. A metre is 100 centimetres and 1000 millimetres. An Imperial pint is 568 millilitres; not so compatible (so we standardised on 600 ml.) Please note that US soft drink now comes in metric sizes, eg two litres. Also temperature. 0 degrees is freezing and 100 degrees is boiling water. 10C (50F) is cool, 20C (68F) is comfortable, and 30C (86F) is hot. If I were to have grown up knowing only Swahili, then English would be challenging. Same when you only know (semi) Imperial measurements; it is just a mindset!
Load More Replies... 
The Metric System IS simplified and makes more sense. But I know how to picture Imperial units in my head so...guess we'll keep it. It's a ploy to sell TWO sets of expensive tools.
I've noticed the new medical center (in the US) I go to records my weight in KG. It makes sense from a professional point of view, but after 8 years living here, I had to recalibrate my brain to think in metric again.
You non-engineers don't appreciate the clarity that comes from having units of mass (kilograms) be a different unit from weight (newtons). In Imperial units, we have to mess with pounds-force and pounds-mass, and screwing it up means your answer is wrong by a factor of 32.
Load More Replies...
Pedantry on: The US does not use the Imperial system. It uses the US Customary system. They're not exactly the same.
Whatever they said, it was still good to know and make close conversions on the fly.
What many people from the US ignore is the fact that the military and science community, amongst others over there, switched in the 1960s and 1970s, but the general switch was so half-arsed that it petered out. Britain uses it for some things and not others. It seems a fairly idiotic way to deal with an international system.
The US in fact DID convert to the metric system, but stupidly did not make it compulsory.
Jimmy Carter tried his damn this to put the metric system into schools and Republicans had a f*****g heart attack! They refused to allow that to happen. Now America is the only country that doesn't use the metric system.
1968 they told us the that the following year the US would be converting to metric. Congress shot it down.
Naturally! A slide rule is for maths; pure numbers, not for measuring length.
Load More Replies...
At this point, converting the US to the metric system would be way too much trouble for too little reward
That's why some people said in Australia about changing to decimal currency and the metric system. Turned out to be no big deal. We are now compatible with the rest of the world, including the US in scientific, medical and engineering fields.
Load More Replies... 
I was in those classes and I'm glad for it. Some of my clients use metric, so it's nice to be able to understand basically what they want and do any conversions later.
The only time the metric system is used in the US is to make things seem bigger or faster.
The metric system is the tool of the devil according to abraham simpson
I don't get why people not from the U.S. care so much about what measurement system we use. We use a different system and it works fine for us, now get over it.
Because it is confusing when you use units like ounces, pounds, feet, yards, miles, US pints and US gallons. The rest of the world has to convert those units in order to understand.
Load More Replies... 
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.
Wow! That must be an old text book. The lipid cell membrane was known to be flexible in the year 1925, and confirmed in the late 1950s.
According to the OP, there probably will never be a point in time when the facts that we know about the world will never change again.
"I don't think that the facts about the world will stop changing, since our understanding evolves with ongoing research and discoveries," they told Bored Panda.
That Christopher Columbus discovered America. Just ask native Americans about this one.
To be fair he did discover it. And so did the vikings. And so did the people who crossed the land bridge from Europe wayyyyy before that. Things that are not known by a group get discovered by that group and it doesn't preclude another group who have no awareness of it from discovering it too.
Areas of taste on the human tongue
This is misleading, while different taste receptors are spread all over the tongue, they are in fact more common in certain areas. So it is still possible to for example to taste bitterness with the tip of the tongue, however the taste is way more potent on the back of the tongue. Edit: grammar Edit 2: check the comments please, Ace has an important addition
Gen X here.
We'll run out of oil by 2000.
I remember something along those lines too. Pretty tough being in high school and thinking, what will get me first, nuclear war, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, starvation because of no fossil fuels or aids.
The author opened up to us that they never thought that their question would get so much attention on Reddit. "I know it was a good question, but never had such an expectation," they said.
"I think it went viral because I believe every redditor went to school and they could come up with an interesting answer," the redditor noted that the topic was something that most of us could deeply relate to.
The reality is that we all have some knowledge blindspots. There are gaps in our knowledge that we’re not even aware of. These can range from misconceptions about common sense things to false interpretations of more complex situations.
The best that any of us can do is to keep an open mind when we come across information that runs counter to our experiences. This means being humble enough to recognize that nobody is perfect, that everyone makes mistakes, and that we might be wrong in some cases. Scientific knowledge is rarely ever stagnant for long.
That your permanent record really does follow You for Life a bunch of Bologna
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.
I get angry that the education system was still teaching Rutherford's plum pudding model of the atom a full hundred years after it ceased to be relevant.
That you have to do lots of extra curricular activities, sports, and volunteer work just to get into any colleg. Joke's on them. I went to college 10 years after high school so none of it mattered.
I went to a boys and girls college (A nod to Forest Gump) after I retired from the military. Lots of things to fill out on the school application. I just wrote "Nope, not doing this section- it was 30 years ago"
However, being open-minded does not mean being naive. This doesn’t mean accepting any and every piece of information that comes your way.
As one study from 2021 pointed out, people tend to think that repeated information is more truthful than new information. This is known as the illusory truth effect. To put it simply, the more often we hear a claim, the more we think that it’s true. This means that all people, no matter how educated, can fall prey to everything from fake news to advertisement campaigns.
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.
Of course the brontosaurus existed. It was thought to have been a taxonomic synonym of its close relative Apatosaurus, but a 2015 study by Emmanuel Tschopp and colleagues found it to be distinct.
That the English language has comprehensive and consistent rules.
What facts from your own school days have you seen get disproven within your lifetimes, dear Pandas? Is there any information from your lessons and lectures that you personally find hard to let go of even when you know it has been updated? We’d like to hear what you think—tell us about it in the comments.
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
Basically any idea promoted by the D.A.R.E campaign
I'm curious if anyone had to get together as a class and sing any DARE songs. I still remember the one we did. No amount of drugs has allowed me to forget! but then I mostly just stick to those rx'd to me.
1970's elementary school - Global Cooling was in process. We would be out of oil by the end of the 80's
Cracking your knuckles will cause arthritis, plus basically everything in history class.
Eating fat causes you to get fat.
Ugh, I hate when this one is brought up because they're trying to oversimplify it. It sounds like they're trying to say you can eat fat and NOT get fat, which is not the case. Fat still has calories (and lots of them). Eat too many calories and you'll get fat, doesn't matter what group (fat, carb or protein) they come from.
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. 🤣
I learned in school that the earth had 5 continents. America was seen as one continent comprising of north, central and south america, Australia and all the islands made Oceania, and Antartica was not considered a continent. When my daughter started school, I learned from her now they teach that there are 7 continents! And Oceania no longer exists, it's called Australia.
That breast feeding was a form of contraception
This!!! It works for many women but not all. I always, always tell my postnatal women not to depend on it, & when they say they’re never having sex again (news flash- people DO have sex again after childbirth, and often sooner than they think!) I ask them how unhappy they’re going to be to discover they’re pregnant again at their six week check?
That by 1999 all the landfills would be full and we would have to use the Grand Canyon and valleys for our garbage
That 98% of our genes are unused, a throwback of evolution.
Note: this post originally had 37 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
I think one of the best changes in schools today is kids learning about the history and culture of indigenous people. Back in my day we learned tons about Captain Cook and the British discovering Australia. But we were taught absolutely nothing about the people who had lived here for 60,000 years. I'm so glad that has changed. Today my daughter's high school has a whole subject 'Indigenous Studies'. Excellent!
That's cool. My school had a pretty good history program for its time, but we still learned next to nothing about pre-coloniel history, and First Nations peoples tended to be talked about as a monolith. I'm glad it's changing.
Load More Replies...
Bored Panda Staff: "Let's post this list every week. It is easier than finding new content."
Cfs is a mental illness has been debunked. It's definitely a physical illness that originates in the brain. Only positive to come out of covid is the link between long covid and cfs
In the US: one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Two parallel lines running forever in the same direction will never meet. The first time I heard that in math class in 6th grade, I knew there was something wrong with that statement. The teacher got mad at me. I went home and told my dad. He laughed, but wouldn't tell me why. "You'll figure it out," he said. I was an adult before I learned Euclid reversed himself on that and said they might. (Space is curved, babies.)
Huh? What color do you get then that is different from everyone else? https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/what-color-does-red-and-blue-make-when-mixed/
Load More Replies... I think one of the best changes in schools today is kids learning about the history and culture of indigenous people. Back in my day we learned tons about Captain Cook and the British discovering Australia. But we were taught absolutely nothing about the people who had lived here for 60,000 years. I'm so glad that has changed. Today my daughter's high school has a whole subject 'Indigenous Studies'. Excellent!
That's cool. My school had a pretty good history program for its time, but we still learned next to nothing about pre-coloniel history, and First Nations peoples tended to be talked about as a monolith. I'm glad it's changing.
Load More Replies... Bored Panda Staff: "Let's post this list every week. It is easier than finding new content."
Cfs is a mental illness has been debunked. It's definitely a physical illness that originates in the brain. Only positive to come out of covid is the link between long covid and cfs
In the US: one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Two parallel lines running forever in the same direction will never meet. The first time I heard that in math class in 6th grade, I knew there was something wrong with that statement. The teacher got mad at me. I went home and told my dad. He laughed, but wouldn't tell me why. "You'll figure it out," he said. I was an adult before I learned Euclid reversed himself on that and said they might. (Space is curved, babies.)
Huh? What color do you get then that is different from everyone else? https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/what-color-does-red-and-blue-make-when-mixed/
Load More Replies...