10 Lies We Learn in School: The Facts Behind Common Myths

Plenty of “facts” picked up in school turn out to be simplified, outdated or simply wrong: astronauts float because they are falling, not because space has no gravity; diamonds do not come from coal; and the tongue has no separate zones for sweet and bitter. Below are ten classic classroom myths with what the evidence says. One twist: a few corrections that circulate online with lists like this one are myths themselves, so we flag those too.

A line often credited to Albert Einstein says that education “is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” Einstein did use it in a 1936 address, but he attributed it to an unnamed wit, so even the quote at the top of a myth-busting list needs a footnote. It still makes a good point: what lasts is the habit of checking.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

Space and the Earth

1. “There is no gravity in space”

Gravity does not switch off above the atmosphere. At the height of the International Space Station, about 400 km up, it is still roughly 90% as strong as on the ground. Astronauts look weightless because the station and everyone in it are in continuous free fall: they are falling towards Earth, but moving sideways so fast that the planet’s surface curves away beneath them. The same pull keeps the Moon in orbit and holds galaxies together.

2. “Diamonds are compressed coal”

This one sounds plausible, since both are made of carbon, but the timelines do not match. Coal forms from buried plant matter in the upper crust. Most natural diamonds crystallised 150 to 250 km down in the mantle and are about 1 to 3.5 billion years old, far older than the first land plants. They reached the surface much later, carried up by fast-rising volcanic rocks called kimberlites. Geologists think the carbon came mostly from the mantle itself and from carbonate rocks, not from coal seams.

3. “Columbus proved the world was round”

Educated Europeans had known the Earth was a sphere since ancient Greece. Eratosthenes estimated its circumference around 240 BC. The real argument about Columbus’s voyage was about size, not shape: he used a badly underestimated figure for the Earth’s circumference and placed Asia much closer than it is. His critics were right about the distance; he was saved by an unknown continent in the way. The idea that his contemporaries believed in a flat Earth was popularised in the 19th century, notably by Washington Irving’s romanticised 1828 biography of Columbus.

Columbus was not the first European to reach the Americas either. Norse sailors led by Leif Erikson reached North America around the year 1000, and timber cut by Norse tools at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland has been dated precisely to 1021. Neither he nor Erikson “founded” America, which had been home to Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

The living world and the body

4. “Chameleons change colour to blend in”

Camouflage is part of the story, but not the main part. Research on chameleons shows that their colour changes serve mostly for social signalling, such as warning rivals or courting mates, and for regulating body temperature, with darker colours absorbing more heat. Some species do use colour for camouflage. So the classroom version is incomplete rather than entirely false, and lists that call it a flat lie overstate the case.

5. “Different parts of the tongue taste different things”

The famous “tongue map” traces back to a mistranslated and over-simplified reading of a German paper from 1901. Taste buds that respond to all the basic tastes are found across the tongue, although sensitivity varies slightly from place to place. There are now five widely recognised basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami, the savoury taste of glutamate. Sour detection has been linked to a proton channel called OTOP1, identified in studies in 2018 and 2019, which helps us notice acidity such as unripe or spoiled food.

6. “Humans descended from chimpanzees”

Evolution does not say that. Humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor, and our lineages split apart roughly 5 to 13 million years ago, with many recent estimates clustering around 6 to 8 million years. Since then, chimpanzees have been evolving just as long as we have. Fossils such as Sahelanthropus tchadensis, about 7 million years old, come from close to that split, but no fossil has been confirmed as the shared ancestor.

Inventors and artists

7. “Thomas Edison invented the light bulb”

Edison did not invent the electric light from scratch. Many inventors, including Humphry Davy, Warren de la Rue and Joseph Swan, built earlier incandescent or arc lamps. Edison’s team made a practical, long-lasting carbon-filament bulb in 1879–1880 and, crucially, a whole system to power and sell it.

However, a popular “correction”, that Edison bought Heinrich Göbel’s light bulb patent from his widow, is itself a legend. The claim that Göbel had built lamps decades earlier was a legal defence used in 1893 patent cases; a 2007 study by the historian Hans-Christian Rohde concluded it was fraudulent. Göbel’s wife died in 1887, and when Göbel offered his inventions to Edison’s company in 1882, it declined. Nikola Tesla, sometimes named in such lists, worked on electric motors and alternating current rather than on the incandescent bulb.

8. “Van Gogh cut off his ear in a fit of madness”

The standard account still stands: in December 1888, in Arles, Vincent van Gogh cut off his own ear (or most of it) after a quarrel with Paul Gauguin, during a period of severe mental distress. A theory published by two German historians, Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans, argues that Gauguin sliced it with a sword. It is an interesting hypothesis, but the Van Gogh Museum regards it as unproven speculation, so lists presenting it as the “truth” go too far.

9. “An apple fell on Newton’s head”

Newton himself told the story to his friend William Stukeley in 1726: watching an apple fall in the garden at Woolsthorpe set him thinking about why objects fall straight down, and whether the same force reached as far as the Moon. Nothing in his account says it hit him. The bump on the head is a later embellishment, and Newton did not “discover” gravity, which everyone already experienced; he described it mathematically as a universal law.

History and politics

10. “Lincoln simply fought to end slavery”

Lincoln’s record is more complicated than either the heroic or cynical version. In his 1862 public letter to the editor Horace Greeley, he wrote: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.” That was a statement about his official duty to preserve the Union, and in the same letter he said his personal wish was that all people everywhere could be free.

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 applied only to areas in rebellion, which is why it did not free enslaved people in loyal border states. Lincoln then pushed hard for the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery nationwide in 1865. In 1864 he wrote plainly: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” So lists that claim he was not opposed to slavery misread the evidence; he opposed it personally while making decisions as a wartime president.

Why school myths survive

Most of these myths are not deliberate lies. They are simplifications that made sense for a classroom, a textbook author who copied an older textbook, or a story too memorable to give up. A few patterns repeat:

• Good stories beat accurate ones. An apple bouncing off a genius’s head is easier to remember than a conversation about orbits.
• Science moves on. Umami was only widely accepted as a basic taste in the late 20th century, and sour receptors were identified only recently.
• Corrections get distorted too. The Göbel and Gauguin stories show how a “hidden truth” can spread just as easily as the myth it replaces.

The useful habit is to ask where a claim comes from, whether the source is primary, and whether experts in the field accept it. That works for textbooks and viral lists alike.

Sources: original list via News247; WIST Quotations: Einstein’s 1936 remark on education; Wikipedia: Weightlessness; Wikipedia: Diamond; Wikipedia: Myth of the flat Earth; Thinking Humanity: Vikings in North America in 1021; Wikipedia: Chameleon; Wikipedia: Tongue map; Wikipedia: OTOP1; Wikipedia: Chimpanzee–human last common ancestor; Wikipedia: Heinrich Göbel; NPR: Who really cut off Van Gogh’s ear?; Wikipedia: Isaac Newton’s apple tree; The American Presidency Project: Lincoln’s letter to Albert G. Hodges (1864); original video (no longer available).

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