When you're trying to teach dozens of students the finer points of history and science, sometimes it's just easier to provide a simpler narrative.
But as James Loewen chronicles in his classic book "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong," teaching simplistic narratives of history doesn't do anyone any good.
The same issue exists in other subjects as well. No, Isaac Newton didn't "discover" gravity when an apple fell on his head. And yes, Pluto is still a planet — it's just a special kind of planet.
Like many myths, these stories often have a kernel of truth to them — it just isn't what you learned. Here are 14 things you may have learned in school that have since been proven wrong:
MYTH: Chameleons change colors to camouflage themselves.
In pop culture, chameleons are thought of as spiky lizards that change their skin to fit any color or pattern in their surroundings. This belief makes them metaphors for things like disguisable military technology and talented actors.
But while their color-changing abilities are prodigious, they mostly use it to maintain a certain body temperature and as a way to communicate with other chameleons, not to hide from predators.
In any case, cuttlefish are much better at changing colors to fit their surroundings.
MYTH: Christopher Columbus discovered America.
The belief that Christopher Columbus discovered America is apparently widespread. In a 2005 survey from the University of Michigan, 85% of Americans believed that Columbus discovered the continent while only 2% of respondents were able to correctly answer that Columbus couldn't have possibly discovered America because Native Americans already lived here.
In any case, the first European to land in America is widely accepted by historians to be the Viking explorer Leif Erikson, who sailed from Greenland to Newfoundland in Canada in around 1,000 A.C.
Columbus is historically significant because, in his 1492 voyage to the Americas, he brought diseases that killed a massive portion of the Native American population — some suggest as much as 90%— and paved the way for European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere.
MYTH: You can only taste certain things on certain parts of your tongue.
According to the tongue map myth, different parts of your tongue are for different sorts of tastes. The back of your tongue detects bitter tastes, the front takes in sweet tastes, and so on.
This is wrong. Taste receptors are all over your tongue, and they all pick up all kinds of tastes.
It's true that some taste buds are more receptive to certain kinds of tastes than others, but the difference is slight, according to the University of Florida Center for Smell and Taste, and the locations of those taste buds aren't in accordance with the "tongue map."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider