3 Misconceptions from Kindergarten (That You Still Believe)

Maybe your parents didn't expect you to get an Ivy League education in Miss Sandy's kindergarten class, but they also probably didn't expect you to learn a bunch of totally false information, either.

Almost half of the science that you learned in kindergarten is totally made up-- and your teachers probably kept telling you that it was true well into middle school, high school, and even college. You might even still believe some of it.

Miss Sandy probably didn't lie to you on purpose; she just regurgitated a bunch of scientific factoids that her own teacher taught her twenty years before she started teaching. Still, it's time to finally get rid of all the misconceptions from kindergarten, which are trapped in your early-childhood memory along with eaten paste and pigtails.

1. A Rainbow Has Seven Colors.

When you learned about rainbows in kindergarten, your teacher taught you that a rainbow has seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. You probably had to memorize the name Roy G. Biv as a mnemonic, and pictured Roy as some sort of awkward, multi-colored version of Ronald McDonald.

Isaac Newton-- the gravity guy-- invented the ROYGBIV rainbow, but it is actually 100% made up.. There aren't seven colors in a rainbow. There are actually an infinite number of colors in a rainbow-- in theory, it carries every single possible color. We divide them up arbitrarily to make them easy to remember and reference. But who's to say that pink isn't a shade of red, or that indigo isn't a shade of blue? Physicists, that's who. And they do it totally arbitrarily.

Until Newton shocked and confused generations of children, the rainbow was defined as five colors-- red, yellow, green, blue, and violet. At that time, most people regarded orange as a shade of red.

Newton was a New Age hippie ahead of his time, and thought it would be cool if colors corresponded with the seven musical notes in the major scale. He believed that every single color in the rainbow has a corresponding note in music.

And, of course, he completely pulled this out of his butt. He could have just as easily added teal to the spectrum, and said that there are eight colors, each corresponding with a hot dog in a pack. This misconception from kindergarten still sits with most adults, who will eagerly name the seven colors in a rainbow if asked.

2. There are three primary colors: red, blue and yellow.

As soon as you were old enough to smear paint on a page instead of shoving the paintbrush into your mouth, your teacher probably got to work teaching you how to mix colors. You probably learned that you can make any color in thh world by mixing three hues: red, blue and yellow. This key component of kindergarten education, like the ROY G BIV rainbow, is also a total misconception.

The basic notion of a primary color suggests that, like a chemical element, it can not be made from any other color. It also suggests that you can make any color in the color wheel (or rainbow) from these tones. Both of these notions are absolutely wrong. In reality, there is no set-in-stone law stating what is-- or isn't--a primary pigment color.

Have you ever tried to mix hot pink? What about cyan? These shades can not be mixed from the conventional palette of primary colors. Additionally, it is possible to mix red and blue from colors classically regarded as seconary or tertiary. Cobalt violet and cadmium orange paint combine to make a perfect "primary" red, and a "primary" blue can be made from ultramarine blue and phthalocyanine green.

The kindergarten misconception of three primary colors is common even in advanced arts universities, because it is simpler and easier to understand than a more comprehensive form of coor theory.

3. You have five senses.

Scientists divided our senses into 5 specific categories about as arbitrarily as Newton divided up the rainbow. There's no hard, solid rule saying that your sense of taste is distinct from your sense of smell. There's also no reason that your sense of pressure is the same as your sense of touch. In reality, you don't have five senses. You have more than twenty-- including your sense of time, balance, hunger, thirst, and I-need-to-poop.

We often speak of our "sense of time" as a metaphor, but it is actually an extremely legitimate component of sensory perception. Additionally, any kindergartener can tell you that it is uncomfortable to hold your breath for a long time, or to abstain from water for several hours. Which sense is involved in these feelings?

The "five senses" theory promoted among other kindergarten misconceptions persists for no reason other than convention. We are so used to defining everything by five senses that it seems to impractical to expand that defintion.

Schools throughout the country often unwillingly promote misconceptions even to their youngest students, and we take these at face-value because we are never told otherwise. But, at any stage of life, a capacity for critical thinking is the foundation of a solid education.