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.
Lucky you. I just got iterate answers like "it's just the way it is" and "oh it's too advanced and you wouldn't understand it".
Pardon my language, but seriously fuck those teachers. If it's too advanced then at least let me come to the conclusion myself and have something to look forward too.
Leave it to HN to spend checks 57% of the toplevel comments debating whether the word "lie" in the term "lie to children" is in fact literally correct.
My bleeding linguistic descriptivist heart dies a little every time I walk into a debate like this. Does it really matter what we call it, as long as we can all agree on what it is we're talking about? At which point we can have insightful debate about whether the concept to which the term refers is a helpful, or unhelpful, one to engage in.
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Personally I think it is; as another commenter already mentioned, "all models are wrong; some are useful". Any oversimplification of a real-world concept is bound to fall down at some point, and lots of oversimplifications are useful right up to that point.
Many times as a kid I asked for an explanation of a real-world phenomenon from a grown-up and received something that had way too much detail or nuance to hold my attention span, or for me to comprehend at the time. Usually I dropped pursuit of whatever had led me to ask the question in the first place, and as a result it would take years for me to accomplish something I could have accomplished much earlier.
Other times I asked for an explanation and received one that was oversimplified but perfect for what I needed, and was able to stay focused on, at that point in my life. Those were golden moments; more often than not they resulted in leaps in my education, and I was later able to "correct" the explanation I'd received once I ran up against its limitations.
And it's not just children; many adults who aren't subject matter experts get overwhelmed if you try to present things in a way that's as technically correct as possible. I honestly believe the ability to simplify to exactly the level one's conversant needs for their situation is one of the most underrated skills on the planet.
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(There's an undeniable irony to how long this comment is. Ah well; to paraphrase Mark Twain, if I'd had time I would have written a shorter comment.)
> Leave it to HN to spend checks 57% of the toplevel comments debating whether the word "lie" in the term "lie to children" is in fact literally correct.
And it is not and it is hurting the debate and is causing secondary problems like it will hurt the scientific world view in general because they equate actual lies like made up stories created to deceive masses with scientific simplifications.
I have personally observed this kind of reasoning that (out of ignorance) equates arguments with very different importance. Being able to say that "scientists lie to the children" could easily become a serious argument for them.
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.
> The idea that primary schools might be teaching a simplified version just doesn't come up.
This reminds me of an Atlantic article from a few years ago entitled, "The Curse of Econ 101."[0] In that case, IIRC, the subject was how debates about economic policies like minimum wage laws suffered when people with some knowledge of microeconomic principles tried to extrapolate that to much more complex questions.
His Royal Institution Christmas lectures inspired me to study maths, I was quite proud of getting red ink all through one school homework answer where I used his main area of work instead of whatever method the teacher was expecting to see.
Seriously, I met the dude once 25 years ago for a single evening and I still remember it vividly. Charisma seems an inadequate word for what he had. And he had the chops to back it up.
Meanwhile my University group invited Benoit Mandelbrot along in the same year and were making fun of him for years later. So self-important, so little to say. Zeeman, for his part, didn't actually mention his own work once. He wanted to talk maths and the history of maths and there was no subject we touched that he hadn't already thought deeply about.
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.
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".
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.
> How else will you even attempt to simplify it to 10 years old?
> The electron cloud model says that we cannot know exactly where an electron is at any given time, but the electrons are more likely to be in specific areas.
> math, which thankfully can’t be simplified to the point of lies.
Er, at least by the standards being thrown around in this thread it absolutely can be and regularly is. You can't have less than zero of something, it only makes sense to take the root of a positive number, any time we avoid generalizing the area under a curve or rates of change because calculus won't come up for a few years...
I'm against lies and wouldn't mind skipping the Santa, except it's ubiquitous around Christmas, it's present in schools and kindergartens. Instead, we settled on explaining that Santas are a kind of delivery service, similar to the delivery people that drop packages off at our apartment regularly. Parents and grandparents buy presents, a Santa delivers, and it's all a kind of fun game. Seems like a good compromise - technically true, and doesn't take away the play, just makes it explicitly make-believe.
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.
No, you won't trigger a loss of trust if you do it the right way. This year, my 7-yr-old, for the first time in his life, asked me clear questions about Santa and all this stuff (we had more of that going on). Having been asked a clear question, I of course gave him a clear answer.
First he was sad - he liked the world of Santa, little gnomes hiding sweets for him in the woods when we were out hiking, things like that. But my clear answers just confirmed the suspicions he already brought home from school.
Then we talked about how this was a nice game adults and older kids play for the younger ones - and he got that immediately, kids inherently understand (and like) role playing games. So now he's in the role of those who know and play the game for the younger kids in our broader family - and he's proud of it :)
Before that happened, I actually was afraid and unsure about how to get out of this storyline without breaching trust. But it all played out smoothly.
But think about it - you set him up for a fall. You lied, then he spotted it and you told him the truth. This is a loss of trust - the child now knows that his parents lie to him. (Great that you admit it, after, of course.)
Perhaps the lying is to some extent useful - such is the nature of this world and all that - but that whole charade could have been avoided without any deceit in the first place.
But I really don't see how you can argue that its ok to lie 'in the right way' to naive, trusting children, for the sake of some cultural convention.
And I'm not even broaching the pros (?) and cons of the cultural convention.... I'm sure no one wants to hear my thoughts on the 'most wonderful time of the year', lol.
I can't imagine a child would develop long-term trust issues based on a parent lying about Santa Claus. If it's a pattern of the parent constantly saying things like "your doggy went to a farm" or "if you swallow gum, it will kill you", then they'll understand that the parent is untrustworthy. Otherwise, a single make-believe story isn't harmless on its own.
I have 1 one year old boy and I often think about how should I behave. While the Santa issue is trivial to me, I decided I will lie, or hide the truth for that matter, about some topics to protect his innocence until he's mature enough to understand.
> your kids will know that there are things you will lie to them about
And that's part of growing up. I now know that the dog I barely remember (when I was almost 3 years old) didn't "went with his mom that came to pick him up one day", and understanding why they lied is part of growing up. Instead of triggering a loss of trust now I can say "I see what you did there, now I understand".
Yes - but I agree with your dog story - kids can't really understand about a death. Its not a lie - its an attempt to explain at the level you were at when you were 3.
Its a different thing to go along with the social convention of tricking the younger generation, and allowing these external conventions to cleave the trust between a parent and child.
FWIW, we tried to explain my grandfather's passing to our then 3.5 year old without lying, and she herself crafted a story that "he's with the ants", and now, after listening to a truckload of astronomy songs, she says he's "in space" and "fell into black hole". We can see she pattern-matches the event to any other concept of "lost and not coming back" she comes across.
The problem here seems to be that "lie" is a loaded term.
Understanding is a point somewhere between an absolute falsehood and the an absolute detailed truth. These two can be hard to define for some subjects but nevertheless.
People who don't have the mental capacity or knowledge to understand the complete truth can still benefit from a partial understanding of what's going on and that's what this is talking about.
I think it's similar to how programmers use libraries to hide abstractions. We don't need to know the details of what's going on at the lower levels of our stack to be useful even though we're operating with some "false" notions of what's happening under the hood.
I was taught that computer science is the study of abstractions. In my opinion, an abstraction is a kind of story, and storytelling is the most powerful tool that human beings have had at their disposal.
It's absolutely useful to tell 4th-graders that x(t) = vt + x₀ (assuming no acceleration) since they're probably not on top of exponents yet.
It's also absolutely useful to tell 8th-graders that x(t) = at² + v₀t + x₀ since now they can handle exponents.
And it's useful to tell 12th-graders how to do the calculus to get x(t) for variable acceleration.
But that's also inaccurate for very large values of v (or a) due to relativistic effects. However, it's a very convenient simplification ("lie") for the vast majority of people in the vast majority of cases. It's probably possible to explain the relativity math to most 4th-graders, but for most of them it's a terrible use of teaching time and the old "rate times time equals distance" that was drilled into my head at a young age is much more practical.
In 4th grade I was writing very simple animations in basic on an Atari 400 and I absolutely would’ve used and understood this. I think this is a perfect example of perfect being the enemy of good. (And I think I’m mangling that phrase)
I have a working mental model for how electricity works that is useful enough to let me do (some) electrical work, figure out simple electronics circuits, have some sort of understanding of how electrical devices like light switches, light dimmers (of the mechanical and the electronic kinds), motors, batteries etc work, ... All of these are useful skills.
Yet I know for sure I do not understand electricity, as I do not even understand most of the answers given to me when I ask about whether electricity has mass. And, apparently, many people who claim to know about physics don't either, because I get all sorts of answers that contradict each other.
Should I not know what I do know about electricity because my mental model is a simplification? I think your position is needlessly absolutist. I don't think my teachers ever taught me 'junk', just a (useful) simplification/model of reality.
I remember learning that electrons actually move in the opposite direction that current is marked on diagrams because when they started drawing them they couldn’t tell which way it flowed and ended up being wrong, but it doesn’t actually matter as long as you are consistent about it so they kept it “wrong”.
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.
Well forgive me if I'm misunderstanding but it seems that all human knowledge being approximate it all comes under this heading. They are simply saying is that it may not be best to start with the most complex approximation.
It would be better to think how to appropriately simplify the state-of-the-art knowledge instead of going through consecutive confusingly wrong historical theories as often happens now.
I'm in the same boat. I always wondered whether the thing they are teaching next is really the way things are supposed to be or if it's once again simplified mumbo-jumbo..
In more general terms - not just applying to children but to anyone - I call these "Feynman lies": the kind of lies you have to tell so as not to drown the receiver into very deep technical details.
In essence this means presenting a model of the world that is sort of fundamentally incorrect, but one that is useful in allowing one's to wrap their head around the ideas. "All models are wrong, but some are useful", yadda yadda. "meet where they are" is a really nice way to put it, although it can be tricky to not paint ourselves in a "like rubber bands" corner!
> I can't explain [magnetic] attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. For example, if we’d said the magnets attract like as if they were connected by rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they're not connected by rubber bands, I shouldn’t be in trouble, you’d soon ask me about the nature of the bands… and secondly if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain, so I have cheated very badly, you see.
> [...]
> But I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else that you're more familiar with, because I don’t understand them in terms of anything else that you are more familiar with.
I grapple with this because on the one hand, at some level you must abstract away the most fundamental concepts. It's overwhelming otherwise.
But on the other, these "lies to children" sometimes never gets corrected and you end up with an education system that produces adults with very incorrect models of the world.
We can "Lie to Children" but I think it's very important to emphasize that they are explicitly being lied to because the Truth (or the model that is closer/closest to the truth without overwhelming most anyone) requires knowledge of concepts they haven't learned yet. And at every step change in knowledge, they are updated about how "true" their "lie" is.
This reminds me of something I read nearly ten years ago and have tried finding since - I'm hoping somewhere here can help.
It was an article or paper about analogies being dangerous in the sciences and leading to misconceptions, even among the learned. As best as I can remember, there was an example of graduate students in physics, at either Cambridge or Oxford, who overwhelmingly had an inaccurate view of concepts in physics based on toy explanations and Nova specials etc.
This puts a name to the approach that I've been using to write my Rust book. Leaping directly to a final, idiomatic solution without explaining all of the fundamentals first doesn't actually teach anything (except memorisation). It's often more effective to show a more straightforward, but possibly less idiomatic or performant, solution first. Then later introduce more complexity.
But I realise that if you stop reading after a few chapters you might go off into the world and write suboptimal code. In my mind this highlights the difference between a reference and a textbook designed to teach. If you just want the final answer, check the reference. (Or have an AI autocomplete for you.) But to teach you have to bring people on a journey and show some "mistakes" along the way.
My premise is that people learn better that way and retain the knowledge because you are giving them the chance to "discover" it themselves.
I believe, that the "lies to children"-approach is one of the driving forces behind the general science-skepticism, and maybe even behind some consipiracy theories and some climate-science-denial.
It basically goes like this:
1. Teachers are authorities and present facts to children
2. people later learn that some of these facts are in-fact not factual
3. people learn that:
a) authorities can not be trusted
b) it is ok to make up facts, as long as they sound good
4. people apply a) and b) to other situations
"Lies" is nice and provocative, but I think it's potentially limiting as you develop these ideas out. A recursive lie to children, perhaps.
I feel that it's quite relevant for anyone who wants to learn philosophy these days. Western philosophy has, for hundreds of years now, mostly taken the form of dialectic or polemic. A philosophical position is polemical response to a previous philosophical mode, one that the new school defines and characterizes. Often one that they even names.
Marx defines and characterizes capitalism. Academic feminism eventually characterizes patriarchy. Postmodernism responds to.modernism. The enlightenment counters medievalism.
As the era progresses, we know about the earlier modes of thought primarily from the polemical retorts. It's much easier to gain a rudimentary understanding of "what non-trinitarian gnostics believed" from inquisitors and heresiologists than it is from reading gnostic sources.
Even when the Pendulum swings, the inquisitor's definition tends to persist.
Ayn Rand and other late modern, libertarians/objectivists adopt Marx's use of capitalism, and what capitalists believe. Revivalist religious movements rely on heresiologists for their theology.
These "lies" are necessary scaffolding for modern ideas.
I don't think that this statement is correct (the quote on Wikipedia, not your conclusion).
Educators do indeed employ lies-to-children with the intention of deception in many cases. It's not the primary intention, but it is still intentional deception.
In some cases, there is no intention to deceive (e.g. when a teacher immediately explains that 'what I'm teaching you is an intentional oversimplification, and is not completely correct'), but in many cases, educators leave this to the teacher who needs to teach the newer, more correct model later. This is especially true at a young age.
> the authors acknowledge that some people might dispute the applicability of the term lie, while defending it on the grounds that "it is for the best possible reasons, but it is still a lie".
The models that they call "lie" are, in fact, mostly correct, they are good approximations, with limited scope, and sometimes don't handle edge cases, the same with Newton's gravity and many topics.
The same way that Pi is not 3.14159, nor it is 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286, and it's not a lie, just an approximation.
Yeah, I agree the name is terrible. The logic that simplifications of complex topics are "lies" essentially makes every part of human knowledge a lie - which makes it a meaningless term.
Ultimately every single thing you think you understand ends at an approximation or a simplification. That's just the nature of the world. It's not a lie - it's just a simpler abstraction of the underlying truth.
The entire field of engineering is based on creating simple models of things and using them to build complex things. Every engineering class is pre-empted with "these equations are simplified approximations of how things work in the real world, but they're good enough for designing things". Those aren't lies - just useful tools.
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.