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Lie-to-children

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Re: Lie-to-children

#21

Post by fifteen1506 »

smokel wrote: post #12

This does not make sense. These are not lies, but simplifications. The only lie seems to be the title itself. I would have expected Santa Claus, storks delivering babies, and perhaps even God, to show up under this heading. Count me disappointed.

As I'm kinda against lies but don't to deprive my kids of Santa, in my world all Santas you see are franchises/agents of the main Santa.

I also add I have never seen the real Santa because he is insanely fast to go to all locations of the world.

Re: Lie-to-children

#22

Post by fifteen1506 »

speeder wrote: post #5

When I was a child myself I hated this and as adult I am still unconvinced it is necessary. Also this sort of stuff made me lose lots of trust for educators in general, even university level ones are willing to teach junk.

My wife already explained my kids I tend to complicate things, so I always start by saying, "in simple terms, yes [whatever whatever was asked]".

Re: Lie-to-children

#24

Post by cs02rm0 »

smokel wrote: post #12

This does not make sense. These are not lies, but simplifications. The only lie seems to be the title itself. I would have expected Santa Claus, storks delivering babies, and perhaps even God, to show up under this heading. Count me disappointed.

I'd be tempted to argue simplifications can be lies. If you simplify the colour palette of the world to greyscale then the lie is that there is no red.

But, not having looked at all of them, some of them can also be what were historically our closest understandings of the way things actually worked. In which case I'm not sure it is even a lie through simplification rather than just teaching children the evolution of our own understanding.

Re: Lie-to-children

#25

Post by moomin »

It's fascinating how much of this there is about. It gets worse when people don't realize there's other ways of looking at things. You'll note there's a whole social movement based around what its proponents refer to as "primary school biology". The idea that primary schools might be teaching a simplified version just doesn't come up.

I once had the honour of talking to Chris Zeeman down a pub. He asked me what I was studying, and I said Newtonian dynamics. This began a solid rant about how he thought it was taught all wrong and by the time we were at university we should be taught about the principle of least action as that would stand us in much better stead as we moved onto more sophisticated versions of physics.

Re: Lie-to-children

#26

Post by verisimi »

fifteen1506 wrote: post #21
smokel wrote: post #12

This does not make sense. These are not lies, but simplifications. The only lie seems to be the title itself. I would have expected Santa Claus, storks delivering babies, and perhaps even God, to show up under this heading. Count me disappointed.

As I'm kinda against lies but don't to deprive my kids of Santa, in my world all Santas you see are franchises/agents of the main Santa. I also add I have never seen the real Santa because he is insanely fast to go to all locations of the world.

You will inevitably trigger a loss of trust - your kids will know that there are things you will lie to them about, as you are indeed lying to them to support a cultural norm.

I suggest it is better not to lie - why bring deceit into that relationship? - but keep the idea of Santa, if you like.

Re: Lie-to-children

#27

Post by kqr »

speeder wrote: post #5

When I was a child myself I hated this and as adult I am still unconvinced it is necessary. Also this sort of stuff made me lose lots of trust for educators in general, even university level ones are willing to teach junk.

According to Accelerated Expertise, it is even actively harmful, depending on goals. A lie-to-children can later be used by the student as a "knowledge shield" to reject evidence that their understanding is wrong.

Of course, if one does not expect any further learning in the field, a lie to children may be acceptable.

Re: Lie-to-children

#28

Post by koliber »

I hated chemistry in high school. It did not make sense. It was hand-wavy and incomplete and lacked foundations. It got to the point where I consciously stopped doing work and learning, and began failing tests.

Thankfully, my teacher noticed. She had a conversation with me, and I shared my frustration. She was direct and said something to the effect: "This won't make sense right now. There are a bunch of other things you'll need to learn before you have the tools for this to make sense. But you still should learn it, as it is one of the things that you will need to everything to make sense."

It was the relief I needed. The way she explained the approach, acknowledged that it won't just yet make sense, but also outlined the way forward, gave me what I needed to resume learning chemistry. I did alright in the end.

Just now I realized she was talking about "lie to children."

As an aside, this is what good teachers are made of. Thank you Dr. Roberts.

Re: Lie-to-children

#29

Post by pizza234 »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #24
smokel wrote: post #12

This does not make sense. These are not lies, but simplifications. The only lie seems to be the title itself. I would have expected Santa Claus, storks delivering babies, and perhaps even God, to show up under this heading. Count me disappointed.

I'd be tempted to argue simplifications can be lies. If you simplify the colour palette of the world to greyscale then the lie is that there is no red. But, not having looked at all of them, some of them can also be what were historically our closest understandings of the way things actually worked. In which case I'm not sure it is even a lie through simplification rather than just teaching children the evolution of…

The parent's model is more consistent if one thinks in terms of "abstractions" rather than "simplifications".

As a matter of fact, I'm a big proponent of "abstraction-based" model of parenting/education - one presents to children complex/multi-layered topics, and children will absorb the layer they're able to understand, and ignore the deeper layers. sexuality is the one of the most obvious topics.

This approach is not entirely obvious, as some will typically say "children won't be able to understand the topic"; the problem with this argument is that complex/multi-layered topics are not all-or-nothing.

In the case of the colors, I'd argue that an abstraction of the colour palette would be "three colors and their mixes" rather than "grayscale".

Re: Lie-to-children

#30

Post by sillysaurusx »

smokel wrote: post #12

This does not make sense. These are not lies, but simplifications. The only lie seems to be the title itself. I would have expected Santa Claus, storks delivering babies, and perhaps even God, to show up under this heading. Count me disappointed.

The title is correct. Teaching kids that electrons orbit around a nucleus like a planet around the sun is a lie. It’s not even a rough simplification. We’ve known this for around a century. Yet that was the model I learned in high school, let alone grade school.

I hated school precisely because there was no mystery. Everything was known. It wasn’t till later that I found out many of the models taught on the blackboard were lies.

Even most of history class; Columbus should have died on his voyage, because it was known at the time that his calculations for the size of the Earth was wrong, but this is rarely mentioned. Same for the lie that the other types of protohumans died out because "they were worse at using tools" rather than because we brutally murdered them. The latter is a nice example of an uncomfortable idea that we deliberately lie to kids about so that they don’t have to know.

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