One damn lie after another

This is one of my PhD student's view of science education - that at every level you have to unteach the pupil what you taught at the last level, that we have to teach half truths as the whole truth. The art of simplifying learning to be appropriate for different age levels is a challenging one. We too easily patronise children's ability to understand by palming them off with gross oversimplifications or worse still misconceptions. We all have to come to grips with reality versus fantasy, but adults add difficulty to children's development by lying to them that Father Christmas and tooth-fairies are real, and bogey-men are out to get them. I remember being very indignant about this at the age of three, getting out my soapbox and preaching the gospel of disbelief in Santa to all the local children, to the anger of local parents. Since children expose these lies, they develop a positivist view of the world - 'if I can't see it and touch it, I can only assume that you are lying to me again'. God therefore stands little chance after the age of 8.

Jerome Bruner spoke of the spiral curriculum, in science especially - that you can teach anything to any age so long as you get the level right. This should not mean half-truths and lies, in this or any other subject. It involves building up interest in the world, and curiosity. It requires sharing with children what we don't know as much as what we do. Nothing is worse than an adult giving children a wrong answer to a why question just to shut them up. It closes down curiosity with a statement of apparent authority. That lie may get carried forward into adulthood and be passed on to the next generation after that.
Adults, including parents and teachers, are fellow learners with their children. This involves not only admitting ignorance, but revelling in it - not to know something is an invitation to explore. The child may find the solution first, and become teacher to the adult. Both children and adults have a duty to cross-question in order to test whether something is believable or not. This habit of dialogue - Socratic dialogue, the habit Socrates began - needs to be developed from birth. It is part of the respect we owe to the child, and this includes having our own opinions interrogated by them.

One implication of this is that teachers of young children need to be wise, intelligent, and well-informed. You need to understand something very fully and deeply if you are to put it into simple language without oversimplifying it into a lie. And mostly they are not; we don't pay them enough, or educate them enough. We take the view that you don't need to know much to teach little children.
And by doing so we build the foundations of lifelong failure.

©Stephen Bigger 2008