Some Things We Learned in School

And Why It's Time to Unlearn Them

Good morning and welcome to Shelf Life, where today you’re getting the validation that your least-favorite teacher wasn’t always right about everything. Or maybe they were, what do I know? Maybe your least-favorite teacher was right about everything. 

One of my most-favorite teachers in high school used to say that in 100 years humans would evolve from a five-fingered hand to a single-fingered hand, whose single finger we would use to hunt-and-peck at the keyboard, because that was how he typed and I guess he thought everyone else typed that was as well. Never mind that ten-finger typing was taught down the hall in that very same school, and that this was in the 1990s and keyboard typing had been around for more than 100 years at that point, and also that evolution does not work that way, Mr Wolfe.

Sometimes in school you learn something that isn’t true and is just what the teacher thinks, like Mr Wolfe who believed that humans were destined to evolve really weird hands in a ludicrously short amount of time. 

Sometimes in school you learn something that isn’t true but that is believed to be true by pretty much everybody at the time. This is how most of us learned the ridiculous fiction that our tongue has a four-quadrant map of taste buds and that some parts of the tongue can taste sweet things but not bitter things, and some parts of the tongue can taste sour things but not salty things, and so on. Biologically, this has never been true, but kids have been taught the incorrect map of taste bud zones in school since my parents were kids, and I suspect kids are still learning this fake science today.

When my parents were in school, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) included homosexuality as a mental disorder. By the time I was in school, homosexuality had been moved out of the mental disorders section but distress about one’s sexual orientation had been included as a “sexual disorder, not otherwise specified.” Today, in time for the children of my peers to be in school, sexual orientation is out of the DSM altogether.

Sometimes you learn something in school that is true at the time you learn it but is no longer true later on in life. For instance, when I was in school there were two Germanies and one Sudan. That was true. Today there are two Sudans and one Germany. That is true. Both things were true at a certain point in time. This information wasn’t wrong when I learned it, but it is wrong now because things can change. 

Some other things I learned in school that were true at the time but have changed since the late 1990s include:

• There are nine planets in our solar system, and Pluto is one of them.

• The Poincaré conjecture has never been solved.

• You won’t have a calculator in your pocket everywhere you go, so you need to learn this arithmetic.

Joke’s on you every math teacher ever including My Dad. I have a calculator in my pocket everywhere I go but I don’t use it because it’s still too hard and inconvenient. Is two quarts of milk a better deal today than the half gallon? I don’t know and I don’t care and I don’t drink milk.

All this is to say, sometimes the things you learned in school are not true. Could be for any of the above reasons—maybe it was never true and was taught to you by a teacher who believed it was true; maybe it was never true but the world at large believed it was true and everyone was taught that way; or maybe it was even true at the time and is no longer true. Sorry, Pluto.

If you learned something in school and that thing is not true, for whatever reason, that does not reflect poorly on you. We are socialized to believe the things teachers tell us. 

There’s a theory of learning—whose, I have forgotten and I can’t seem to bring it up in a search—that when you learn a new piece of information you can’t simply slot it into the body of information you already know. It’s like if you built a LEGO castle and then, when you were done, you found a LEGO brick that goes in the middle of the castle. You can’t just attach that brick to the top of the castle. That’s not where it goes. You have to break down the entire LEGO castle, place the brick in its proper place, and then rebuild the castle. That part of the theory, the LEGO part, is probably not from the original philosophy.

The idea is that when you learn something new, you have to break down your whole body of knowledge, find the place the new information goes, and rebuild your body of knowledge again with that fact in the correct place. This is labor-intensive and exhausting, and it gets to be moreso as you age and you have a larger body of knowledge to breakdown and rebuild each time. 

I think this is why some people will reach a point in life where they refuse to learn anything new, or at least anything they can’t easily attach to the top of the LEGO castle and call it a day. At some point maybe it becomes too hard, and not worthwhile, to rebuild your body of knowledge from the foundation to absorb a fact that you didn’t learn earlier.

This is regrettable when it happens.

But the truth is that nobody is too old to learn something new. It might be more inconvenient to learn new things when you’re older but that’s all it is—inconvenient. Well, maybe also uncomfortable. Discomfort becomes less tolerable as one ages. The evolution of my shoe collection over time can attest to this.

Have you ever heard the saying, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks?” This could not be further from the truth. Dogs love to learn new tricks when snacks are involved. One of my dogs is about to turn 13 years old. If I give her a treat today at 2:45 in the afternoon, tomorrow she will come up to me at 2:44 in the afternoon and start barking for her treat. That is how well she learns new things when food is involved.

So perhaps if you are an old dog and you find it difficult to learn new tricks, the solution is snacks. Just something to consider. Have you tried eating ice cream while you bulldoze your body of knowledge to its very foundations and rebuild it around a new fact? In my experience, eating ice cream while doing unpleasant things makes them much more palatable.

Without further preamble, here are some things you may have learned in school that are not true.

“When I was in school there were two genders.” Yes, well, as I mentioned earlier, when I was in school there were two Germanies and now there is one Germany. Maybe you only knew about two genders when you were in school but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more than two in reality. Speaking of Germany, German has always had three genders—feminine (die Katze), masculine (der Jungen), and neuter (das Mädchen). The Zande language of Africa has four genders: Masculine, feminine, animal, and inanimate. Zulu (African) and Ngan’gityemerri (Australian) have even more genders. Latin has three genders and has been taught in schools in the United States since there were schools in the United States.

I realize people are talking about the gender of humans and not the gender of language when they say “there are only two genders” but there have always been more than two genders of human. Even if you draw a direct line from gender to biological sex characteristics, there are more than two. Records of intersex people go back to the 7th century CE and there have certainly been intersex people longer than there have been records of them.

“When I was in school, they was a plural pronoun meaning a group of people, never a single person.” Not unless you went to school in the fourteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary has recorded uses of the singular they dating back to 1375 in writing, and this was almost certainly circulating in speech before writing. Interestingly, the use of you as a singular pronoun (used for only one person) came later than the use of they as a singular pronoun.

Or, as @vaspider (on the application formerly known as Twitter) more poetically put it:

I know there are actually a lot of things like this: Things that were taught in school as fact—and perhaps that were factual at the time—but that are no longer true and correct. I can’t get into all of them here but I just wanted to tackle a few of the ones that seem to come up all the time in my experience.

The important thing to remember, when confronted with new information that wasn’t taught to you or perhaps wasn’t even true at the time when you were being taught, is that things change over time. It doesn’t reflect poorly on you if you have to open up and learn some new information after your school days are behind you. This happens to everyone.

It does reflect poorly when someone is closed to new information, even though the world has changed, because they simply don’t want to learn anything new.

Imagine how you would respond to someone who went around insisting there are two Germanies, East Germany and West Germany, and that they were too old to learn about something new like a unified Germany.

None of us want to be that guy.

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