Analysis / Lies to Children

• Talking to minors about sex is an awkward issue, because you don't really want them trying to do it at a young age, but you don't want to ignore the issue and wait for the wrong person to tell them, or worse, show them. Peoples' views and methods on telling minors about sex varies. In one specific case, J. K. Rowling was asked exactly what Aberforth had done with goats at a Harry Potter Q&A session:
  Fan: In the Goblet of Fire, Dumbledore said his brother was prosecuted for practicing inappropriate charms [JKR buries her head, to laughter] on a goat; what were the inappropriate charms he was practicing on that goat?
  JKR: How old are you?
  Fan: Eight.
  JKR: I think that he was trying to make a goat that was easy to keep clean [laughter], curly horns. That's a joke that works on a couple of levels. I really like Aberforth and his goats. But you know, Aberforth having this strange fondness for goats, if you've read book seven, came in really useful to Harry, later on, because a goat, a stag, you know. If you're a stupid Death Eater, what's the difference. So, that is my answer to YOU.
• Talking to minors about drugs. Because most of the negative effects of drugs (and alcohol and tobacco, for that matter) are either long-term, a result of excess use, or only happen in some cases, a lot of parents worry that their children won't understand the true dangers, and either exaggerate the effects, outright lie about them, or at least cherry-pick the worst examples, giving the impression that everyone who tries any kind of drug will have their life destroyed. This is especially risky, since most kids will eventually meet someone who's used some substance or another and came out just fine. Once young people realize their parents were overstating the dangers, all credibility on the subject may be lost.
• In moments of crisis (for example, when someone dies or a natural disaster happens), adults tend to try to spare their kids from information that they perceive as potentially hurtful and try to sugarcoat or distract them from "hurtful" information. This, of course, usually serves to make the kid more anxious and less able to cope with the situation — in no small part because they can tell they're being lied to, which erodes their trust. For this reason, local authorities maintain teams of counselors and special advisers who are sent into primary schools where a traumatic event has recently taken place — part of their job being telling the teachers how to tell the kids what has happened. They also deal with parents who try to insist that the teachers enforce this trope when it's impossible. A blogger who escaped with her family just barely ahead of Hurricane Katrina later wrote that she had told her kids they were going on vacation. When the kids asked about the huge traffic jams and crowds of terror-stricken people, she said "everybody's going on vacation today." One presumes she told them the truth once they got to safety.
• There are various examples of this in education:
  • Linguistics classes. Beginners learning English are first taught Present Simple. So they are taught to say, e.g., "I sit" when they really mean "I am sitting".
  • Math classes. Expect to hear that one is prime, or sentences like "You can't take the square root of a negative," or "You can't subtract 5 from 3," or even that division comes after multiplication in order of operations, while in reality it is done with multiplication in the order they appear.^note It's only a convention for writing down expressions, and has nothing to do with math. Heaven help you if you try to explain that distinction to young children. On the other hand, there's been a math equation that's caused controversy for its different outcomes depending on what method you decide to use. One of the most enduring "lies" (only debunked during advanced courses of complex analysis or operational calculus) is that "you cannot calculate the logarithm of a negative number"; you can do it if you remember how to convert real functions into complex forms.
  • Physics classes, though these tend to be stated as simplifications.
    • "Spherical cows", which is a humorous term used in physics circles to describe the tendency to boil a complex thing down to its most basic components, in order to make calculations easier. The result is answers that are mathematically correct but inapplicable to reality. Comes from a joke where a farmer asked his physicist friend to come up with a way to make his milk cows more productive; the physicist indeed found a way but lamented that it only worked in the case of spherical cows floating in a perfect vacuum.
    • Frictionless surfaces. Again, refers to the tendency to over-simplify problems by removing troublesome variables, in this case the effect of friction. In reality, there is no such thing as a true frictionless surface — even a smooth surface with a high-grade lubricant on it will still produce some friction.
    • There's also the "paintbox" system, in which red, yellow, and blue are called the "primary colors". If we're not lucky enough to get a decent physics education by high school, we may take this to our graves. In fact, there are two separate forms of primary color: the colors of light and the colors of pigment. The primary colors of light (used for most computer/phone/TV screens) are red, green, and blue, while the primary colors of pigment (or "subtractive colors", used primarily in printers) are magenta, yellow, and cyan. Which, granted, are KINDA red, yellow, and blue, but not quite. (And Roy G. Biv can just go take a flying leap for all the use he is.) For those of you encountering this fact for the first time, the key question is this: what happens when you add all the colors at once? If you get white, you're using the light system, and if you get black, you're using pigment.
    • Isaac Newton's laws of motion. While Albert Einstein's theory of relativity surpasses them scale-wise, they are still taught in high schools and lower-division college classes because they produce almost-identical results as long as you're dealing with masses and velocities in a familiar range, as opposed to things as small as atoms or things moving hundreds of kilometers per second. In fact, Newton's laws are such an accurate approximation over this range that our measurements can't tell the difference between the Newtonian and Einsteinian answers. And many high school teachers either don't understand Einstein's mechanics themselves, or if they do, feel that their students won't. It's only when you extrapolate to extremes (size, mass, velocity, etc.) that Newtonian physics start to break down and you start to observe Einsteinian rules. Indeed, in the real world, people use Newtonian mechanics vastly more often than they use relativity, just because they're much easier to calculate and give the same answers unless you're dealing with microscopic objects or things on a planetary scale — satellites are one of the few everyday objects that people deal with (thanks to satellite television and GPS) which actually have to take relativity into account.
    • Most visualizations of relativity, mostly because space is three-dimensional, and curving three-dimensional space is nowhere near as visually simple as curving a two-dimensional mat. Actual visualizations of relativity are possible, but are much more difficult to understand.
    • "Glass is a supercooled liquid." No, it's not. Glass is, well, a glass, which is a state of matter that doesn't fit comfortably into the solid/liquid/gas trichotomy (though to the extent that it does, at ordinary temperatures it is much more accurately described as an amorphous solid than a "supercooled liquid"). See "geology" below for another example of "we're calling this a liquid though it's really not."
    • Many concepts of thermodynamics and electromagnetism are largely simplified when taught in high school and (to an extent) early university semesters. This is because they don't take into account the boundary values, which provide the most realistic tools to study the true behavior of the systems and fields. Problem is, this omission is justified, since boundary values can only be implemented when partial differential equations are used, and these aren't taught until long after differential and integral calculus is. Thus, students will have to assume that the systems they study are fully isolated from the outside, even when they aren't. Thermodynamics also has the case of ideal systems, like gases; the equations that describe the behavior of real gases are much more difficult to derive.
  • Chemistry classes.
    • Students learn several different models on how chemical reactions work, all inaccurate to various degrees but getting closer to the truth each time. Also like physics above, these models generally produce identical results as long as you're not getting too deep into the inner workings of a reaction.
    • The "Solar System-like atom" is still a common image and is generally presented to children when discussing atoms. And another thing about atoms — everyone is taught early on that atoms are the smallest things there are. That itself ignores protons, neutrons, and electrons, which are then said to be the smallest things there are. Then they tell you about quarks, which even escapes the realms of chemistry altogether.
    • Also regarding the "Solar System atom", it is known as the "Bohr atom" and was one of the earlier hypotheses when quantum physics was still being discovered. Unlike Newtonian mechanics, it's not an approximation that gives useful answers, but it's a heck of a good image.
  • Biology classes.
    • Children are usually taught that there are two types of cells: Animal cells, which are squishier and exist in animals, and plant cells, which have more rigid cell walls and chloroplasts and exist in plants. In reality, animal and plant cells are both examples of the many different eukaryotic cells (which also include the likes of fungi), and there are also a huge number of prokaryotic cells. There is also variation within the different types of cell. For example, only green plant cells contain chloroplasts.
    • When learning immunology in high school, you'll be taught that the immune system has T cells and B Cells. In further education, students are taught that T cells actually come in two forms, "Helper" CD4+ cells and "Killer" CD8+ cells. Even higher level education teaches that there are an enormous variety of T cell subtypes, to the point where they cannot be easily grouped into distinct categories.
    • Children under eight are often taught that the definition of life is the ability to "eat, breathe, and grow". In reality, that is only partially true. In actuality, in order for something to be alive, it must have order (being an organised structure), sensitivity to environment, reproduction, adaptation, development (not necessarily growth as in getting bigger but that's admittedly the most common form of development), homeostasis (the ability to maintain a stable internal state), energy processing, and evolution. Additionally, some creatures respire through diffusion instead of breathing.
  • Geology classes.
    • The mantle of the Earth flows under loads, has convection cells, and provides the buoyant force that the lithosphere (or crust) floats on. It is not liquid. It's a very hot, plastic solid called a rheid that can flow, but only on long time scales. It only melts into a liquid when the temperature and pressure are right. This is an understandable misconception because, first, kids are also taught that if it flows at all, it must be a liquid, and second, their only experience with the interior of the Earth is liquid lava shooting out of volcanoes.
    • In a lie-to-high-school-students, the convection cells in the mantle do bring hot material to the crust and cause things like hot plumes (like the one that created the Hawaiian Islands), but they don't account for the movement of the tectonic plates as they spread out, cool, and sink. Rather, the buildup of material at mid-oceanic ridges is pulled down by the Earth's gravity and pushes the plates away (ridge-push) and when a plate is subducted under another plate, it is literally sinking into the mantle and pulling the rest of the plate with it (slab-pull).
  • History classes.
    • Children are taught over-simplified "facts", like "The Roman Empire was destroyed in 476 A.D. by the barbarian invasion". In fact, the Roman Empire in its classic form perished almost two centuries before that date, and was in the process of collapse even longer for various economic and demographic reasons much more complex than a single invasion. In fact, the eastern half of the empire continued on for another thousand years, only ending with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. And a last remnant, the Despotate of Epirus, made it to 1479. The Holy Roman Empire, which claimed to be a successor, lasted until 1806, while the "Third Rome" of Tsarist Russia survived until 1917. Such was the impact of the Roman Empire on historical memory that nations were claiming to be Roman Empires millennia after the Empire fell.
    • Other times, facts are fudged in the direction of giving people credit for things they didn't do. For example, everyone thinks George Washington Carver invented peanut butter. He didn't, but since peanut butter is the only derivative of that legume that the average person cares about, it's rarely corrected.
    • Still other times, facts are fudged to make history more clear-cut than it really was, with morally gray individuals and groups receiving Historical Hero Upgrades and Historical Villain Upgrades. Often this ties in with propaganda, but sometimes it's just intended to avoid having to answer tough questions — after all, no one wants to have to explain something like the Trail of Tears to a 5-year-old. Or it just makes for an easier story to understand.
    • Or simply the fact that in a history class you are told that this is how the things happened. As there is never complete information on a single event described in history available, one can only say how it most likely happened.
    • Incidents of Values Dissonance will generally be glossed over or ignored entirely unless it's central to the intended narrative. For instance, don't expect the fact that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves to get much focus.
    • Virtually any story in history class will be streamlined and omit stuff like "Well our only source on this is x, and while x is usually reliable, there are issues like..." or "Well, we have the sources a, b and c on this and we think a is correct when it comes to [this and that], b is more trusted when it comes to [other aspects] and while c is the only one to mention [anecdote] we have good reason to trust c nonetheless". This may be interesting to get into - and indeed a good history class should at some point teach how to critically read sources, but if you have to weed through the contradicting sources every time you learn about a historic event, little to nothing would get done in class.
  • Astronomy classes.
    • Remember that depiction of an atom looking like a solar system? Not all solar systems look like that anyways, or at least, ours doesn't, with several planetoids having orbits that don't line up with the planetary axis. And back when they still considered Pluto a planet, its orbit would sometimes place it closer to the sun than Neptune, making Pluto the eighth planet, not the ninth.
    • Orbital mechanics get complicated in a short hurry, what with so many objects orbiting other objects which orbit other objects, all of them moving through space. Earth's Moon only travels in a circle (well, an ellipse) around the Earth if you ignore the fact that the Earth itself is traveling in a circle (well, again, an ellipse) around the Sun. The Moon could very easily be argued to be traveling in a circle (well, you know) around the Sun instead, being dragged along by Earth's gravity well.
• Amateur automobile racers are taught to use the brake and throttle under the guise that a car's center of mass moves (hopefully where it should) between axles during such manoeuvers. Actually the load on each axle moves, the shift in the center of mass due to the car leaning forwards or sideways is very small. Weight transfer is generally of far less practical importance than load transfer.
• "North is up" when explaining how to read a map. While this is true for how the vast majority of maps are drawn (especially world maps), the orientation can really be any direction and it's best to check the compass rose on the particular map. Applying this misconception to world maps has also led to some vicious Eurocentric views going back to the 1400s, if not earlier.
• All flat world maps in general are distorted, although admittedly that's unavoidable. ^note Many different distortions are possible; see for example xkcd #977. People should be taught to understand this, though. Especially when the ones emphasising the northern hemisphere are still so widely used and very problematic considering the power imbalance between the two hemispheres. (The classic example is when Greenland looks as big as Africa. In fact, Africa is about 14 times bigger. That's how big the distortion is. Africa is always bigger than you think.)