As children, we sponge up knowledge. Everything is new and different. Some of the most benign things can seem extraordinary. On top of this, we have little as regards critical faculties. We often accept things at face value, and the things we learn in this state of childhood can remain unexamined into adulthood.
I watched Christopher Reeve’s Superman as a child, and I listened to the explanation Luthor gives as to why Superman reacts to kryptonite. I believed it. I believed a bunch of technobabble for years. It’s completely made up. I hardly even recognized where the information had come from, but in the back of my mind, I had this idea that if a man was away from his home planet for long enough, he would somehow become allergic to it.
Eventually, I thought about it, I recognized where the idea had come from, and I laughed at myself. The mistake was innocuous. In what situation would this misconception have had any bearing on my life outside of causing me a little embarrassment?
But it does seem extraordinary to me how easy it is to learn falsehood, and learned, how easy to not recognize it as false. As children, it is necessary that we not be much critical, partially because one needs a foundation of knowledge to be critical from—for we must first be indoctrinated to reject indoctrination—and partially that we have the simple pleasure of believing our dreams.
There are other, more serious lies we are told as children, but it is inescapable that we should incorporate false information. In the instance with the superman movie, I can’t imagine there was any intention to fool me; It was just a passing line to keep the plot moving. As children, we gobble it all up, and are insatiable for more; How is it that we would not consume truth and falsehood together?
One of the best teachers I had in grade school posted upon his wall a warning about such things. It was so long ago now that I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something like: It is easier to learn something false than to unlearn it. For how true that was, it does not undo the fact that life is full of false lessons and indeed, false teachers.
In high school, I had a good teacher who was very much on the other end of my politics. When he taught his subject, I loved him, but when he spouted his philosophy, I was often frustrated. By that age, I had at least some ability to criticize what I was told, and it was a good thing for me to hear opposing views from someone in authority.
However, I remember a time during Obama’s presidency when I happened upon my teacher watching a video. It was a series of shots juxtaposing a president as he came into office and as he left. A noticeable aging takes place between each. A slide came up of Obama, and it was followed by a picture of what I think was Bill Cosby dressed up like an old man on some sitcom. I was looking over his shoulder, and I laughed. My teacher was overwrought. The punch line was horrible to him.
That was, I think, a fundamental difference between us: I would have seen that joke as good fun whichever side held office; It was personal to my teacher. On a fundamental level, we disagreed. We were, it seemed, working from different sets of assumed truth.
The particulars here are not important, but this is the point: He may have taught many that lesson, that criticizing Obama was morally abhorrent, and he one of many teaching it, and I one of few recognizing it as false. How many of my classmates, and how many of those my age, have accepted as dogma such philosophies taught to them while learning math, history, English, and while engaged in any and every subject?
He was a good teacher. He didn’t lie in the sense of intentional falsehood, only in that he was part of and participated in a lie. There are many good things he taught me, but there were bad things he offered me as well. Such is the case, I suspect, with many teachers.
Such is the case, I suspect, with most of what we learn, that is, in learning the truth, we inevitably pick up some lies here and there. Once I was aware of my belief about aliens and their home worlds, I knew it was false. Becoming aware, however, of our own beliefs can often be the hurdle.
I had one teacher openly warn the class that anything he said not on his subject was, I won’t quote him, crap. Where he was wise, he knew he was wise, and he warned us not to take him too seriously outside of that. More teachers, I think, should take this stand, and more students, I hope, will realize its truth.
In the meantime, children will still be children, and all of us will keep learning. Some of us may even learn how to learn.
Tale Told 