Gutenberg invented printing
Not wrong, but our understanding became significantly more precise.
TaughtJohannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and movable type around 1440, and books existed only after that.
NowMovable type was invented in China by Bi Sheng around 1040, and metal movable type was used in Korea well before Gutenberg. The oldest surviving book printed with metal movable type is the Korean Jikji of 1377, 78 years before the Gutenberg Bible.
What actually happened
Woodblock printing in China dates to at least the eighth century, and the Diamond Sutra of 868 CE is a complete printed book with a dated colophon. Bi Sheng's ceramic movable type is described in Shen Kuo's Dream Pool Essays around 1088. Korea's Goryeo dynasty was casting metal type by the thirteenth century, and the Jikji, printed at Heungdeok Temple in 1377, survives in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World Register in 2001 and named its prize for the promotion of literacy after it.
What Gutenberg actually did is still enormous, just narrower than "invented printing." He assembled a system: an oil-based ink that would stick to metal, a hand mould that could cast type in identical sizes at speed, an alloy that cast cleanly and wore slowly, and an adapted screw press. That combination made European mass production work, and by 1500 there were millions of printed books in Europe.
The honest phrasing is that Gutenberg independently developed movable-type printing in Europe and engineered it into an industrial process. Older textbooks that said he invented it were repeating a Eurocentric framing that historians of technology had already discarded.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 2005, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 1990 learned the earlier version.