August 03, 2005
The Growing Obsolescence of My Education
Posted by Christine Hurt

I suppose it is to be expected in a world of new discoveries, but half the things I learned in high school are proving to be wrong.  This whole "Pluto is not a planet" thing has inspired me to start a list.  "Things That Were Facts But Are Now Not."  As I take my children to museums and read the plaques on the exhibits, I seem more and more ignorant. 

1.  Our solar system had nine planets, including Pluto.

Enough said.

2.  We don't know why the dinosaurs disappeared, but it may have been due to climatological change, the smallness of their brains, or some other crackpot theory like a giant asteroid.

Apparently, the asteroid theory that was presented with such disdain twenty years ago has won, according to the Milwaukee Public Museum.

3.  The Rosenbergs were innocent people who were executed wrongly.

Apparently, according to the International Spy Museum, they were proven as spies sometime in the 1990s.

4.  Alger Hiss was framed.

OK, that probably wasn't considered a fact then, but my extremely liberal U.S. history teacher sort of made it sound like that.  Or, it could have been that in the movie she showed us, Whitaker Chambers was sweating all the time.  He looked like he was lying to me.  Again, the Spy Museum people say he was a spy.

Does anyone else have any examples so that I can catch up to the 12th grade level?

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Comments (6)

1. Posted by winton woods on August 4, 2005 @ 12:09 | Permalink

I would add:

"Jurys find the fact and Judges apply the law."


2. Posted by John Steele on August 4, 2005 @ 14:44 | Permalink

Here's one from my junior high days (@'73): the world will run out of fossil fuels before the year 2000.


3. Posted by Christine Hurt on August 4, 2005 @ 14:47 | Permalink

Ten years later, they were saying the same thing! My husband and I have thought of that from time to time.


4. Posted by Scott Moss on August 4, 2005 @ 17:45 | Permalink

It could be worse. According to my wife Marianna, in the Soviet Union as late as the mid/late 1980s, they taught that Nixon was really innocent; he just was the victim of a corrupt frame-up. Marianna did the latter portion of high school in the U.S., and when the lecture subject was Nixon, she kept waiting for the part where the teacher would explain, "of course, Nixon was innocent...."


5. Posted by Robert Schwartz on August 11, 2005 @ 20:07 | Permalink

Don't put away that info on the dinosaurs quite yet:

India's smoking gun: Dino-killing eruptions

New discoveries about the timing and speed of gigantic, 6500-foot (2-km) thick lava flows that poured out of the ground 65 million years ago could shift the blame for killing the dinos.

The Deccan Traps of India are one of Earth's largest lava flows ever, with the potential of having wreaked havoc with the climate of the Earth - if they erupted and released climate-changing gases quickly enough. ...

All that information points to the 600 meters (2000 feet) of lava pouring out in as little as 30,000 years. This is enough to have possibly released a climate-altering amount of sulfur gases, says Chenet. ...

Chenet and her colleagues' new work on the Deccan Traps is just the latest in a series of discoveries which appear to weaken the case implicating the Chicxulub impact as the primary player in the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction. ...

In fact, most mass extinctions over the past 300 million years have coincided with large volcanic events, said Chenet. The general rule is that massive volcanism like the Deccan Traps correlates with all major mass extinctions in Earth's history, she said.

"In only one case is there evidence for both volcanism and impact," she said. And that is the K-T mass extinction that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. "Our view is that impact added to the stress already generated by an ongoing massive eruption, enhancing significantly the extent of the extinction, which would however have taken place even if the impact had not occurred."

Wiped out in the K-T mass extinction were 80-90% of marine species and about 85% of land species. All land animals larger than 25 kg (55 lbs) were obliterated.

The Deccan Traps are a huge pile of basaltic lava extending over more than 500,000 square kilometers. Its original volume likely exceeded 2 to 3 million cubic kilometers, says Chenet. ...


6. Posted by naveen on March 22, 2006 @ 0:48 | Permalink

i wanna know abt fergusion law college

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