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Not recently, but when I was in High School, we were taught that Shakespeare's plays weren't written down until later. They were cobbled together from people who could remember the lines and wrote them down later.
When I went to college I learned a) not even remotely true and b) High School is basically bullshit to keep you busy until you go to college.
I hear people say the phrase “it’s high school biology” a lot. Yeah, high school biology is simplified to the point of being just plain wrong.
I remember doing really well in high school chemistry. I learned all about the electrons orbiting the nucleous. I take chemistry in university and am immediately told that's an outdated model from the 1900s nobody uses. Why the fuck did I study it then? Because quantum physics is complicated? So you just teach the wrong thing because the actual truth is complicated?? It's really no wonder people have no scientific literacy when high schools explain how the world works like nobody has discovered anything new since 1913.
There's a Pratchett quote that I always think about in this context, about "lies to children"
I could've cut that down more, but I like that whole chunk. I think there is a usefulness in the lies to children approach, if done well. As you highlight though, it can be frustrating when the simplified thing that's being taught isn't just simplified, but straight up wrong.
It's not just high school. That's just how chemistry is taught because it's extremely complex and requires many simplifications to be able to teach it to a lay person in any meaningful capacity. Good instructors will mention these simplifications, but it's likely your current understanding of certain things (especially organic compounds) is also overly simplified. It's unfortunately the only way to teach it.
Probably a jumbled up recollection of the pirated plays people would scribble down to sell to printers or to competing theatre companies.
The First Folio and other "good" sources were probably not directly from Shakespeare's drafts either, but from revised working scripts that the King's Men had around. Still a vast jump from there to "weren't written down until later."
In general, there's a lot of needless mystery and "bardolatry" surrounding Shakespeare, when in fact he was reasonably well documented for a commoner, has had every single scrap of evidence for his life and career scoured over a dozen times, had works of uneven quality, and most of what's unique about him jibes perfectly well with a half-educated prodigy coming in from the country and working in a milieu that was kind of edgy and open to experimentation.
I sheepishly left a class on Shakespeare I signed up for in college because it became immediately apparent that my high school classes on the same subject did not actually prepare me for the next level and I felt like a complete fucking idiot just listening to the lecture.
Maybe the thought was that even Shakespeare took themes and plots from earlier work and even from stories that come from oral traditions?