Work hard and you will be rewarded and taken care of. LOLLLLLLLLLL.

Class of 2003.

Food wheel was taught in elementary school. As were the taste bud "zones" and the American Dream.

I guess the big one for me is the whole Mozart for babies thing. It wasn't Mozart's music making babies and young children smarter, it was a combination of more affluent parents or at least parents with college plus educations having time and income to spend on enrichment activities.

A short list of things you didn't realize were false, stolen from the most recent episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast (on Intellectual Humility, Sept 14 2025):

• "The original 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds lead to a mass panic." -- It did not. However, rumors of a panic spread via newspaper op-eds about how it was a bad idea to get your news through any other medium besides newspapers. Citation: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html
• "You can boil a frog in a pot by gradually raising the temperature of the water." -- This doesn't work; frogs just jump out when they get uncomfortable. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
• "Lemmings march off cliffs to their deaths because they blindly follow one another." -- They don't. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions
  • "...but I saw it in a Disney documentary!" -- Nope. Turns out the filmmakers paid local kids to capture a bunch of lemmings, spin them around to make them dizzy, then manually threw them off cliffs and filmed it. Citation: https://hyperallergic.com/545742/white-wilderness-disney-nature-documentary/

People believe enough random bullshit to tickle their memories with their classics list.

I didn't graduate highschool though

That whole "got milk" campaign was a load of bullshit.

It turns out only about 30% of the global human population is able to even digest milk.

The mitochondria better still be the power house of the cell. Or we are going to flip some tables and burn the place down.

Five senses; taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing, acceleration, temperature, body configuration, pain, balance, time, hunger....

"What you were taught
"Flu shots give you the flu"

What we know now
A common misconception...

Updated understanding emerged around 2020"

Updated for whom? Anti-vaccine idiots?

I went through the two websites posted here for graduation year 2008. The only incorrect thing I was taught that I still believed was:

"Learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) determine how you best learn"

False. Huh.

Left brain/right brain pseudoscience

For me it's the regions of the tongue thing. It never made any sense, and a 6 year old with a sugar cube could have disproved it. Yet they taught it in schools for years.

Alpha wolf is a lie.

The one that immediately springs to mind doesn't exactly fit the criteria, because it wasn't even true at the time that I was taught it in public school in Texas. But my history teacher taught me that no real historian called it the "American Civil War," and that it was correctly called "The War of Northern Aggression." And, of course, although the Confederacy did want to keep slavery legal, their actual central reason for seceding was "states rights."

Like I said, both of those are simply lies. Only propagandists call it "The War of Northern Aggression", and it was always explicitly about slavery.

The sad thing is that I believed and repeated these lies for years after that. Note that, like most people, I didn't have access to the internet to easily check things myself. Since at the time I had zero interest in reading about history, it was difficult to correct my knowledge.

It has demonstrated, to me at least, the importance of keeping propaganda away from children. The more you lie to children, the harder it will be for them to become functioning adults.

The fact that we thought Pluto was a planet seemed absolutely insane at the time but none of the kids could question the adult in the room when the stupid rock is literally not even staying in its own lane

The very architecture of the Internet (it was a written with a capital I back then) made it impossible to take over, and traffic would naturally route around any damaged links or nodes.

Google and CloudFlare have since proven that sonsabitches with enough money can subvert it completely, and it only takes a few dudes dragging an anchor from a boat to disconnect entire countries for weeks and months.

I can think of a few.

• That T-Rex' vision wasn't actually based on movement. (Probably)
• Feathered dinosaurs are a thing.
• What we were taught as the 'reservation' system more closely resembled concentration camps, and indigenous people were given a 'choice' between death marches and war.
• That the US military was actually on the wrong side of nearly every civilian movement for greater rights, from suffrage, to labor, and now freedom of speech and immigration.