Murder by Death

I'm enjoying the heck out of this book, save for one area so far.  This is where the writers broach the subject of 'lies we tell' to children.  

Perhaps because I'd just finished Hogfather, I was expecting these 'lies we tell children' to be of the sort that involve the easter bunny and St. Nick and the tooth fairy, or the idea of the big old farm where all beloved pets to go live out their last days in heaven.  

But no, what I got from the authors is the assertion that the 'lies-for-childen' are ones that involve more important concepts, and I have to say, I'm with the Swedes here and think their assertion that these simplifications are lies is horse shit.  Their first example is a rainbow.  Kids are taught about rainbows by using prisms to show that all white light can be broken down to it constituent color parts, and indeed there are more than a few ways for kids to see this in action for theselves, one of the easiest being a hose set to mist, then pointed in the correct direction relative to the sunlight and ...voila! a rainbow.  

But the authors consider this explanation a LIE, because nobody tells the kids abut why, when the water's refracted into colours, it forms a rainbow at all - why is it in an arc form?  Why has the geometry been left out of all the explanations?  All of these omissions is why they call them "lies to children".  

I maintain that these guys don't have a firm handle on the difinition of the word "lie".  Kids first learning about rainbows by learning about prisms, etc. are NOT being lied to; they are being taught the information they can absorb.  As they continue to learn more, their definition of how a rainbow forms and why it forms an arc, grows; their increased ability to reason and think for themselves, makes it easier for them to take on the additional truths that pertain to a rainbow's formation.  Telling someone a partial truth because it's the part they can understand is not a lie - some might call it the responsible way to teach new concepts to blank-slate pupils.  Teach a concept, let them take it in, reason with it, make it part of themselves, and then expand it - grow the knowledge with the next step, and then the next.  I think this style also lends itself well to raising kids primed to adapt to new information. 

So, these are NOT lies.  Telling children rainbows come out of a My Little Pony's butt... now THAT'S a lie-to-children.

So I'm enjoying the read a LOT (and I'm loving the science bits, even when I'm playing the Swedish part and think the authors are full of shit).  But hands down, I'm still loving the discworld stuff the best.  :)

(Apologies for an incoherence; half asleep, but I wanted to get this down before I lost it completely in my dreams.)   Night!  :)

ETC:  I had to go back and tweak my grammar and punctuation.  It wasn't as bad as I feared when I woke up this morning, but there was a least one word that ... wasn't, and a lot of MIA commas.