"You need to learn this because you won't always have a calculator on you!"

That I was a republican. The teacher gave out this political alignment quiz that was incredibly biased asking things like "do you like lower taxes or higher taxes?" and "do you like more freedom or less freedom?" All the questions basically lead you to the same answers. So the entire class basically had the same result.

This was in middle school so I wasn't even politically engaged yet. I didn't realize how crazy this was until years later.

That tastes have specific regions on the tongue. We actually had to protest when that shit was taught at our son's elementary school. Don't know if it came up for our younger daughter.

Poor kids at school had old atlases where Germany was still separated. But I guess that's just obsolete and not false knowledge.

The United States operates on the principle of three co-equal branches of government, which check and balance each others power.

Trickle down economics (well, it's not like there was a time when it was true)

That humans came out of Africa once and then settled the rest of the world. In reality there was a constant migration of humans in and out of Africa for millennia while the rest of the world was being populated (and of course it hasn’t ever stopped since).

I love how much DNA analysis has completely upended so much “known” archaeology and anthropology from even just a couple decades ago.

Taste buds are arranged by flavor in four sections of the tongue. Complete load of horseshit.

Multiplication tables (I still know them mostly). I have a calculator on damn near every device now.

Things will always get better <-- this one is the biggest lie of them all

That America is the best and most free country in the world.

I would say "cursive is how adults write, you'll need to know it", but that wasn't true then either.

• that Pluto is a planet

Study and work hard will make you successful.

Trickle down economics are an effective way to redistribute wealth

I was chucked into Christian school in high school.

So... a lot of it.

"Those bullies will be working at a gas station while you'll be the boss!"

The D.A.R.E. program.

That blood is actually blue until it gets in contact with air

I was taught the Philippines was a US territory. I just learned last night that hasn’t been true since 1946. I went to school in the 90s.

-Coequal branches of government

-Separation of Church and State

-Life terms for SCOTUS ensures political impartiality

-The second amendment was so that we could defend ourselves (see: redcoats)

-Bohr system

Haven't seen anybody post this but how gender and sexuality is, schools are so fucking about straight mom and dad only relationship and nothing else. Man and wife bullshit when there's infinite amounts of gender and sexuality and diversity out there. Fuck I hate Amerikkka

Basically everything I can recall being told in D.A.R.E program classes (war on drugs era propaganda taught in public schools in the USA) was utter nonsense and fabricated bullshit. After actually having personal experience with most of the substances they vilified, none of the effects - good or ill - are what I was taught in that ridiculous program.

On the contrary, some of the fear tactics they used made me curious to investigate on my own. The breathlessly scared rural teacher describing the mind bending effects that "magic mushrooms" was supposed to have sounded fascinating to teenage me. In reality, they are very fun and therapeutic to use, but nothing like the wild Alice in Wonderland mind journey they made it sound like it would be.

We don't know what the appendix does, the whole pluto thing, I think the Oxford comma is going out of style, and cursive in general.

But I love cursive, mine was "very nice" according to my teachers.

Not only in School, even at university I was taught the DNA structure was solved by Watson und Crick. But they stole data from Rosalind franklin and even openly admitted it years later.

That CO2 makes up 0.03% of the atmosphere. But it was true then.

My favourite one was that the earth is 6000 years old

Going to college was guaranteed success in life.

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was seen as just one of several possible theories, rather than accepted fact.

The appendix is a vestigial organ that doesn't actually do anything in humans. (It might still fit the definition of vestigial, but it's far from useless and we keep learning more about how valuable gut health is.)

How planes generate lift.

Physical Vs chemical changes.

It was typically taught that physical changes are differentiated from chemical changes because they could be "undone" or that they had "no chemical reaction." Which was very confusing, because you can't uncut paper, and dissolving stuff in water clearly results in different chemicals being produced, yet both were examples of physical changes (actually the latter is sometimes taught as a chemical change). Furthermore, most chemical changes are actually reversible.

It has since been recognised that this classification is BS, and most changes actually exist on a continuum.

It was false then but my seventh and eighth grade science teacher told us that blood was blue. My mom was a nurse so I knew that it was bullshit but was definitely confused because he was my science teacher.

A huge number of aspects of the US's geopolitical enemies, and its own mythologization of the Founding Fathers and early settlers.

There was also a really bad political test with liberalism on the left and conservativism on the right, and we had to take a test and put what we got in front of everyone, which was very strange.

Making grimaces and being told that your face may remain that way if you don’t stop making them… 🤡

Supersize me was fake and tonsils are not a useless byproduct of evolution.

I have one that was proven false, and then later re-proven true: the existence of the brontosaurus.

When I was in elementary school, we were taught that they existed, they were big, etc. Then, at some point while I was in college, I discovered that actually what we thought was a brontosaur was a brachiosaur or an apatosaur. And then, when my kids went to school and learned about the brontosaur, I discovered that actually, they did exist!

I was taught that Jupiter had 17 moons, Saturn has 12 and Pluto has 1. Many more have been discovered since.

Then there's the whole "different areas on your tongue taste different flavors." Like you only taste sweet with the tip of your tongue, the middle tastes salty, etc. I remember being given various substances by my fifth grade teacher like sugar, coffee, lemon juice, table salt etc. and we tried putting them on different areas of our tongues and we were like "...no, we taste everything everywhere."

The myth that glass is a very thick liquid. It's actually much weirder than that. https://gizmodo.com/the-glass-is-a-liquid-myth-has-finally-been-destroyed-496190894