Talk:Lie-to-children

Use In Adult Education section
I removed this part of a sentence because its meaning is not clear: "...leading up to a stage where the one 'lying' are the students themselves as they formulate their own elaborations." ([//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lie-to-children&type=revision&diff=762173272&oldid=762172391 diff]) If the original editor or others would rewrite this part, perhaps as a separate sentence, it might be appropriate to include it in this section. I did not try to rewrite it because I do not understand the intended meaning and I did not want to make it worse! :^|   - Mark D Worthen PsyD   (talk)  03:22, 27 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Although I made a few minor tweaks, I think this section ("Use In Adult Education") is an excellent addition--heck, it helped me to better understand the Lie-to-children concept! :O)   - Mark D Worthen PsyD   (talk)  04:19, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

Freudian theory
So I removed:
 * Sandor Klapcsik acknowledged in a 2008 article in the journal Extrapolation that Freudian theory functioned as a reductive form of lie-to-children, and went on to note: "True, it happens to be an extremely useful one."

with the edit summary:
 * Freudian theory is generally regarded as incorrect; didn't seem like a good example here

and Jayron32 reverted with the edit summary:
 * That's the IDEA behind the lie-to-children. They are wrong, but useful...

Good point, but I'm not entirely sure what psychological theories are taught to advanced students of which Freudian theory are a simplification taught to new students. For example:
 * Freud's psychoanalysis doesn't really help in explaining why cognitive behavioral therapy works or how to do it
 * If you look at the article unconscious, it explains that Freud's theory on the structure of the unconscious mind (ego, superego, id) is not a simplified version of the modern cognitive psychology models of unconscious phenomena.
 * If you look at dream interpretation, Freud's theory that dreams manifest repressed desires seems to be one of several equally simple answers to the question of what dreams mean.
 * Freud's views on sexuality are not simplified versions of a more complex explanation; they are simply weird and in some cases now just considered offensive.
 * Death drive is in direct opposition to, not a simplification of, modern evolutionary psychology.

I don't have access to the article to check, but I'm wondering if Klapcsik was using "lie-to-children" in a metaphorical sense, as in a theory that was useful to hold in psychology for a while to propel the field to further discovery? In that case I'm not sure it's a good example of a literal lie-to-children, because it's not actually used for teaching. I've certainly seen Freud mentioned in psychology classes, but mostly just to explain the history of the field. I would think of it as similar to the celestial spheres - it might be mentioned as part of the history of astronomy, but no one is taught that theory anymore; Newtonian physics are the simplified form of modern orbital mechanics. -- Beland (talk) 16:40, 7 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Sounds good! -- Jayron 32 01:10, 8 December 2017 (UTC)


 * I concur with Beland removing that section today. Freud as an example of lie-to-children makes no sense to me.  - Mark D Worthen PsyD   (talk)  08:53, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Bloated, weirdly focused
This article makes a mountain out of a molehill. Someone gave this not-even-very-catchy name to something with which every parent, grandparent, and schoolteacher is familiar: explanations are often oversimplified to the point of even being false in some sense; this article then belabors the use of this phrase lie-to-children here, there, and everywhere, as if it's some breakthrough concept. I have no idea what we're supposed to learn from this unending trip to nowhere, and it has a strongly promotional feeling to it, to be honest. EEng 12:52, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

, you're an educator. What do you make of this weirdness? I can't find any uptake in the outside world of this as a term or as any kind of significant "concept". EEng 19:16, 22 August 2018 (UTC)
 * It's a standard and familiar concept to me at least, enough that I've used it as the title of a blog post . Google scholar finds 175 hits for the exact phrase "lies to children", and I think most are on-topic. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:58, 22 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Perfectly familiar to me too, because it's a perfectly obvious and old concept. What I don't get is the implication that these two or three authors were the first to point it out, like nobody realized it before. EEng 00:19, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Looking around WP, I see very little about milk before meat, a related notion discussed in an LDS church context. I think I first started noticing it some time after the turn of the century, but quick searching has not yet turned up reliable details. Just plain Bill (talk) 02:29, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
 * The "see also" section could use some pruning or expansion. I'm not sure how not even wrong deserves a place there. Moving the goalposts might belong, along with bait-and-switch, and my personal favorite, motte and bailey. Maybe discussion of how related topics fit on a spectrum from "good intentions" to "deceptive shenanigans" belongs under another heading on this talk page. Just plain Bill (talk) 04:24, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

How come if your not logged in your contribution is deleted?
i added an extensive series of notes to this talk page. Yet now when I return it has been deleted? 82.6.88.43 (talk) 09:36, 4 November 2023 (UTC)


 * It can be deleted by someone who disagrees with your argument but it should be in the history of the 'talk' pages. If it's not & is not a result of user error when trying to post. Then that is rather more worrying 82.6.88.43 (talk) 10:19, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Check the edit history of the page, where your edits still exist and try to read what you wrote down. It actively broke the entire page's formatting, duplicated itself 2-3 times, and copied in pages of Wikipedia's help text into the middle of itself.
 * At one point, one of your comments said "Please provide a title for your discussion topic. If you click "Add topic", your topic will be added without a title. Style text Switch editor", which is obviously not what you were trying to do.
 * It was a mess. Feel free to retry. Reil (talk) 15:59, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

A lie to children is an example of a wider range of similar phenomona
[See Note at end of entry]

1. One of the first most obvious link to a similar idea is that of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thumb

2. They are both examples of Shorthand For! Which is linguistic application of the idea of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand

Another example of the use of [Shorthand For] is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand_for_orchestra_instrumentation which is "The [Shorthand For] the instrumentation of a symphony orchestra (and other similar ensembles) is used to outline which and how many instruments...are called for in a given piece of music."

3. But [Shorthand For] is just an example of the Sociology of Science & especially the creation of Language (Jargon is a similar example of language creation) is detailed in Bruno Latour's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_Action_(book)

82.6.88.43 (talk) 10:06, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Weird article
Lies to children are a pest, because they are indistiguishable from a teacher that doesn't understand what he's talking about himself. See that Sussmann, who managed to confuse himself to the point where he forgot that Ohms law is always correct, only a resistor labeled with "100 Ohms" is not actually a 100 Ohms resistor at 250°C, and will never have 100 Ohms again after an excursion to 1000°C.

Anybody who lies, i.e. teaches a simplified model (all models ultimately are) without explaining its limits, does his pupils, students, and everybody else, a grave disservice. No teacher ever did that to me, at least none that I care to remember.

I have no idea why lying is supposed to be a popular concept nowadays. Perhaps has something to do with Donald Trump, or Hillary Clinton, or general politics. 2001:9E8:2B0F:7B00:6D85:E572:F0CA:CCAC (talk) 21:37, 20 December 2023 (UTC)