Huh the Thanksgiving one I was taught that the Indians were nice to the new arrivals, but within a few short years that niceness was exploited and betrayed.
I guess maybe the welcome feast never occurred? But we certainly were taught the pilgrims drove the Indians out
Very cool
I graduated in the 2000’s and the only falsehood from this list I remember being taught was the one about taste buds.
I have definitely been told by nurses to tilt my head back if I had a nose bleed.
Honestly I don’t recall my schools ever having a “school nurse”. I assume most of the teachers were trained in first aid. I went to school in Ontario. Are school nurses an American thing?
Yea I feel like a lot of these came from friends or other sources, and not necessarily from school.
Pretty cool site. I like that you’ve included sources for most of the points. I was aware of the 2000’s falsehoods, but I’m sure there are many who aren’t!
Thanks! I’m hoping to update it with some more obscure ones, but I think the fact that I had a little bit of trouble finding true myths is a good thing haha
You should add the Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus re-re-classification debacle. That one spans multiple decades.
We no longer say “committed suicide” because it’s no longer a crime.
Otherwise it’s great!
Eh, you can commit a lot of acts that aren’t crimes.
I’m no expert, just repeating what I’ve learned in a few suicide prevention classes. Here you can read more if you’re interested.
Eh, you can commit a lot of acts that aren’t crimes. Like committing something to memory. Or being commited to an mental hospital.
I’m no expert, just sharing what I’ve learned in the few suicide prevention classes I’ve taken. Here is more if you’re interested.
Hey thanks! What’s the suggested term instead? This is the first I’m hearing of the term differences so wanna fix it up
When talking about my son, I say took their life, or died by suicide. The phrase committed suicide diminishes the loss/act/cry for help by criminalizing it.
Alternately my best friend I say lost his battle with depression. I think the current internet self censored version of unalived is acceptable as well. I for sure would not be offended if someone asked if that is how my son died anyway.
ETA: any plans to make a mobile version? I am going to go dig out my iPad so I can read the list, my old eyes cannot see everything on my phone.
I’m sorry for your loss, thanks for sharing. Made the corrections to the page.
I’ve heard the page doesn’t work on mobile phones very well, its hard for me to test since it works decently on mine but I think I know a fix I can add in a bit
Huh… And here I thought people said “unalived yourself” because of internet censorship. 🤔
I literally had creationist bullshit in my text books, so I’m thinking this site won’t cover everything…
I strongly debated on including school based myths, but wasn’t sure how to go about researching. I’ll do some digging and see if I can’t make an update
Southern schooled in 80s & 90s, here. They let us believe John Wilkes Booth was a lone actor and not part of an organized plot by southern men to assassinate the president.
The first time one of my northern friends mentioned that bit about a conspiracy, my little naive mind was rocked that schools might bend or bury the truth.
The rest of the list was pretty accurate. Except nurses in schools was a Hollywood myth to me. There was no budget for such positions. We could go to the school office and ask to call our parents if we weren’t feeling well, and we’d better be feeling pretty awful.
I was schooled around the same time in NM, and was also taught Boothe acted alone.
Class of '89 here, that was pretty spot on.
I graduated in 2003. My DARE teachers basically taught drug abstinence and telling an adult about people offering you drugs. The really didn’t talk about gateway drugs and what it does to your brain. This was in Illinois.
I graduated in 2017, they definitely did for me in elementary school.
You’re not the first person to mention some regional differences. Think this is opening up a bigger research project of year graduated to region!
I graduated a few years before you, also in Illinois, and can confirm that.
I can also confirm that I have not resisted the devil’s lettuce.
“Probably didn’t know we could map the human genome… but in 2003…”
I graduated high school in 2003, and had already heard the human genome had been mapped before entering high school. It may not have been true at the time, but I never once heard that it wouldn’t be completed due to the complexity. lol
Actually quite a few of these were already being taught at my high school before it was more common knowledge. Like the stuff with Columbus and Edison. Which now makes me think my school was actually more progressive than I initially thought.
I always thought the holding your head back for a nosebleed was weird. I’d have that awful taste/internal smell of blood in my throat and the occasional gulp of blood clump 🤮
Plus it never seemed to stop it any better than when I’d just hold a tissue to my nose.
This is hilarious. Apparently the program did not pick up on staff grooming and raping young women.
I learned that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. And that busywork and adhering to the rubric is far more important than learning or producing anything useful.
For most people, yeah. A lot of work is tedious.
I mean learning to follow a rubric actually was useful for me. Projects have scopes and expectations. Rubrics are those.
Sure, because a margin being off by a quarter inch should be worth more points than the actual content of the paper.
It can cost you a government contract as an adult. Also, it’s learning to format in accordance with instructions. It’s stuff like margins early on, but later it’s stuff like section headings and citations in APA or MLA. The margins are free points that you’re leaving on the table
A fun fact about taste for you - there is actually no such thing as a ‘taste map,’ or the idea that different areas of the tongue result in you tasting different things. At most, there’s just different regions of sensitivity to taste!
Always thought this was weird and didn’t make sense to my tongue.
You might’ve been taught that lemmings are known to commit suicide because they’re just that unintelligent. Turns out, this isn’t true - they’re smart enough to stay alive!
I blame the video game.
Blame Disney, they’re the one who funded the “documentary” about them.
I never saw the documentary, but I killed a lot of virtual lemmings.
The game was made as it was because of the myth perpetuated by the documentary. On Linux, there was no lemmings game, it was called pingus and it was penguins you killed instead (there may have be a lemmings for Linux, but the first version of Linux I installed myself had pingus already installed).
I do understand that, really, I do.
i don’t think you do.
hey! somebody post an even longer paragraph including the history of lemmings and at least 3 barely related anecdotes.
I actually do understand the point, my responses now are specifically to annoy know-it-all assholes who insist I don’t get it.
You become what you hate most sometimes.
Sucks, doesn’t it?
The theory of a taste map had no scientific basis, i remember funnily enough writing in a school paper that the taste map didn’t exist and got a lower grade for getting my answer wrong even though in hindsight i was the one who was right and i got forced to believe in a medical myth.
Have to wonder how many more of us thought it didn’t make any sense, but didn’t push back because adults said it was so and it was in the textbooks.
I was just far too skeptical for my age and it caused me to have worse exam performance usually having me go from an A to a B- just for defying the teacher. School is more about following authority than anything else I believe.
True. I didn’t openly question things in that class too much for some reason, but I definitely got in trouble for being argumentative in other classes.
I think it’s ridiculous that you can lose a full grade just for being disobedient. I get that school is made for the child to grow up to have a good job but this stops people more inclined to innovate to get far academically.
“Why did I lose a full grade here?”
“You didn’t learn your lesson.”
Pretty accurate. My mom was very much invested in our education and contradicted a lot of this info when I was growing up so I learned the true facts.
It just listed a bunch of myths and old wive’s tales that no one at the time thought were very credible anyway. Literally all of the “facts” they list were common chain letter/email memes that everyone trotted out at parties to sound smart and hip. Nobody ever believed what DARE told us, we always knew Christopher Columbus was an asshole, and every first aid class I’ve taken recommended against the whole tilt you head back thing.
@ElderWendigo @MiraLazine agree to disagree, a lot of those things I was definitely taught - if not in school then at least by adults who thought it common knowledge. Especially the nosebleeds (I had them all the time as a kid, and the amount of blood I ended up swallowing is… A lot.) and knuckle cracking (my guess - started by teachers annoyed by kids making knuckle-noises during class)
Christopher columbus was definitely taught as an “American hero” up until he wasn’t.Pretty much all of these examples were pretty often and commonly debunked by all of my teachers, parents, and adult mentors. But that’s exactly why lists like this are garbage, both of our experiences are anecdotal. You just can’t make blanket claims about things like this about entire generations.
Columbus was more a lie of omission than outright falsehood. That item on the list was probably closest to a universal truth taught across the US, as long as you ignore any school with an indigenous student body. But, most of our teaching about any historical figures in grade school is a near obscene over-simplification of the actual people and events.
Any suggestions for more widely spread myths? Wanna incorporate more but had trouble finding them as being definitely taught in schools
widely spread myths
That’s your problem. You can’t seriously argue that these myths were being taught as fact in school because they weren’t. They’re all myths spread by common idiots through word of mouth. Common public misconception on the facts can and does happen very independently of actual education, as evidenced by antivaccers lately. The only things you could honestly add to a list like this would be some scientific theory that has been definitively disproven or amended. Maybe something like changing training about CPR would qualify also.
But those kinds of things are boring. It’s much spicier to claim that people were taught that Columbus’s contemporaries thought the world was flat even though that was just an over simplified story told to 5 year olds to explain why they got out of school on Columbus Day. Meanwhile anyone that didn’t sleep through trigonometry should learn that Eratosthenes showed the world was round about 1700 years before Columbus. I would believe that there are some lazy educators out there that would teach such myths as fact, but to claim that it was at all universal is silly. The whole premise of “old generations dumb, look what they believed” is just so smug and offensive. I must be getting old.
You can’t seriously argue that these myths were being taught as fact in school because they weren’t.
One of my elementary teachers taught us the taste bud map myth.
Well DARE was taught in schools and that program did spread myths about drugs
They were. Most of the history we were taught was nothing more than pro-America propaganda.
Like for example, the true horrors of slavery aren’t actually commonly known, nor is the true extent of the effects of post-Civil War racist policies like redlining. Or that “crimes” like loitering and trespassing are actually holdovers from fucking Jim Crow laws. Or that American Mixed people originated as the rape babies of slaves.
Or even colonization. Did you know the stupid fucking goddamn Belgian government was the root cause of the Rwandan genocide? They purposefully pitted the Hutus and the Tutsis against each other by giving the Tutsis special privileges and land and shit decades beforehand, playing on their flimsy understanding of the cultural order Hutus and Tutsis already had, enraging the Hutus. And the Belgian government never owned up or took responsibility for it. It wasn’t just France. Macron legit did apologize for the French government’s role but Belgium never did.
Who here was taught about how the U.S. overthrew legit governments in South America and replaced them with dictators?
Or that Libya was bombed to hell and back not because their dictator was a dictator but because he wanted to start selling oil in gold and not U.S. dollars?
Who is ever taught the true nature of any of this shit?
