Paul M Peterson

A Lie-To-Children is a lie told by authority figures to children and students to avoid overwhelming the them with complex information. The consensus seems to be that this lying is OK, even beneficial to the psychological well being of a child. In some cases that may be true if the lie is told to protect a child from a reality that would imperil their innocence. For example, a mother sings a lullabye to her infant to reinforce the notion that the whole world is safe and snug. I don’t have a problem with that kind of “lying”, which is really more a reflection on the child’s cognitive and perceptual development.

Distorted Pedagogy
Parents, teachers, doctors, priests and policemen all lie to make their roles easier. It makes learning a sequential, rather than instant, occurence. It makes knowledge easier to obtain. A teacher on the website Uncertain Principles describes why:

There’s a pedagogical problem requiring lies-to-children, though. The general level of conceptual knowledge we give to students in the first two classes in the sequence is comparable to that of a physicist in the late Nineteenth Century– the basic ideas they learn are all things Einstein would’ve learned in school. All of this, even the mathematical bits, can be developed from basic physical intuition, without actually cheating. Their mathematical background, though, is nowhere near what it needs to be to handle what comes next. Some people will hold that this is a failing in the educational system (I lean that way myself, sometimes), but in practical terms, we’re stuck with it, and have to find a way to get the important “Modern Physics” concepts across without swamping them in vector calculus.

But Lies to children also promote distrust and confusion. About Funny has a cute anecdote that demonstrates this:

A 10 years old boy went to the theater to see a Disney film but entered in the wrong room where people were watching scenes of explicit sex.

The boy left the chamber as soon as he could running over everything and everyone until the exit.

Seeing the despair of this boy the movie doorman asked him:

- “What happened?”

- “My mother said that when we see things that should not be
seen we transform ourselves into stone!” Said the wheezing boy.

- “And did you transformed your self into stone?” Asked the doorman.

The boy responded with a frighten face and looking to his trousers:

- “I was already beginning the transformation…”

My Transformations
Teachers and friends always considered me “gifted” academically. For my age, I showed a highly developed mind. I am not trying to brag. It is just true. I couldn’t read until I was eight years old. By the time I was twelve, I could read at a collegiate level. I only mention this because alot of what would have intellectually overwhelmed me, simply didn’t.

The Problem
Authority figures told me many lies during my childhood. Naturally, during adolescence, I began to distrust them. I could fill a book with the lies I was told. I will limit discussion to a few cases in point. I was told by Doctors and my parents that smoking marijuana would lead to heroin addiction. This was not true. I have never tried heroin. I have smoked much marijuana. You could say, “but Paul, you don’t know that you won’t try heroin in the future”. This is true. However, I think after twenty years, I can call it.

Another example is when my fifth grade history teacher tried to teach his class that Columbus discovered America. I had already learned the truth: Columbus landed south of America and discovered a land already well populated by natives, natives that he later oppressed and enslaved.

Child’s Play
The point is, I think many politicians, journalists and news anchorpersons think of us working class citizens as children. They have access to information that most of us don’t. An important question to ask yourself when interacting with an authority figure and especially while watching cable news is “am I being told the whole story? What are they leaving out?”

Sources and Credits

• principle archive
• illustration by Arthur Suydam on flickr
• About Funny

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