Or the older-person version: no they didn’t, because we didn’t know yet.
There are definitely things my teachers mistaught me that were pushing an agenda (hi, “you can catch AIDS from sharing towels”!), but here’s an incomplete list of stuff I had to learn later because nobody knew in the 00s:
—there were multiple cradles of civilization, not just the Fertile Crescent
—my eye color isn’t a mutation actually, there are five genes controlling it not two and that does in fact allow for weird in-between colors like mine
—clear photos of Pluto (I grew up with the pixelly one we all marveled at because WOW, we got any kind of picture at all from all the way OUT THERE)
—five different species of genus Homo
—Einstein was wrong and there are absolutely no hidden variables driving quantum entanglement
—there is actually a smoking gun that the Kennedy assassination didn’t go the way it’s commonly told
—the FBI tried to drive MLK to suicide
And I could keep going. The older you are, the more pronounced this effect gets; my dad is 69 and could contribute “everything we know about the human genome,” “duck and cover is only marginally effective actually,” and “anything we learned from any space mission past Apollo 13.” (Yes, I realize those dates seem to not add up. He dropped out at 16 and went back later for his GED.)
This is why, when you hear something you previously didn’t know, you should 1) cross-check it against other sources to be sure the facts are correct, but 2) never assume it’s wrong just because that’s not what you learned in school. Because let me tell you, if I stopped with only what I could learn in public school by 2006, I would still believe the Egyptians hadn’t developed pulley systems before building the pyramids, that plasma can’t exist on earth outside of extremely carefully controlled lab conditions, and that Kosovo isn’t its own country.
Fauci claimed AIDS was airborne. I am sure loads of teachers were falsely informed thanks to him.
In the first year of study he said it MIGHT BE passed by close familial contact BUT ALSO required more study. That was twenty years before I took sex ed. My teacher was a devout Christian who was openly pissed off she had to teach us about condoms—in other words, she was one of you.
Shut the fuck up, magat.
Another factor is that textbooks and curricula get updated at irregular intervals, and you're learning a snapshot in history. My second grade science textbook identified mushrooms and fungus as a form of life called "protist" which was a school of thought in the sixties that lasted juuuust long enough to make it into my textbook.
That doesn't even begin to get into the politicization of textbooks-- sometimes it wasn't in your textbook because the people who chose your textbook didn't want you to know it.