Remember when Pluto was declassified as a planet and you began to doubt everything your teachers had ever told you? Turns out, that was just the start.
From science and history to English grammar, Oxford Home Schooling has compiled a list of 10 ‘facts’ which you may have heard in the classroom but are now considered outdated.
Greg Smith, Head of Operations at Oxford Home Schooling, said: “Every year in every subject, experts are constantly learning and updating our knowledge. This means that some things which were once taught at school now don’t tell the whole story, or have even been proved to be wrong!
“This can only be a good thing, however, as it shows that we are developing a greater understanding of our world.”
For more ‘facts’ you learnt in school which are no longer true, visit: https://www.oxfordhomeschooling.co.uk/blog/15-facts-you-learnt-at-school-that-arent-true-any-more/
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5) There are three states of matter - solid, liquid and gas Correction: There are at least five. One of the fundamentals of chemistry, most school students were told that there are three states of matter – solid, liquid and gas. However, scientists now know of a fourth natural state, plasma, which despite not being common on earth, is thought to be the most prominent form in the universe. There’s also a fifth state, the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), where molecular motion almost stops completely. BECs were discovered in 1995, but so far have only been found in laboratories
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6) Neanderthals were not very intelligent Correction: They were skilled hunters with advanced tools. Many people used to believe that Neanderthals died out largely because they were less intelligent than Homo sapiens, but recent studies suggest they had similar cognitive abilities and were actually quite skilled hunters. New archaeological evidence shows they used relatively advanced tools and were also better at socialising than once thought.
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7) The universe is 13.7 billion years old Correction: It’s actually 100 million years older. Science lessons used to teach that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, but it turns out we were out by around 100 million years. The European Space Agency’s Planck mission scanned the sky for radio and microwaves and in 2013 concluded that previous estimates were slightly short - the universe is actually 13.82 billion years old
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8) No-one knows where Richard III’s body is Correction: He was buried under a car park in Leicester. For over 500 years, historians and archaeologists had been searching for the body of King Richard III, who died from injuries sustained in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. The long mystery was solved in 2013 when researchers from the University of Leicester announced that they’d discovered the controversial monarch’s remains beneath a car park in the city