Necessary Deception?

No joke, I was seriously going to start this blog with "The older I get..." Yes, let me pass along the wisdom from the ripe-old age of 20, as I lean back in my rocking chair, smoke a pipe, and reflect. I must have a crazy pretentious blogger side of me, fighting to come out. Maybe starting this blog was a mistake...Anyway...

I was thinking today, and...

Great, now I'm pulling the "deep thinker" card. I wasn't spending the day thinking, today I worked, played soccer, ate dinner, went to a friend's house, watched Conan, and went home. I give up. There's really no easy segway here, so I'll just skip the intro altogether.

In most any subject, there's one thing you can be sure of. You'll start taking a basic course on it, then at some point, the professor will say "Well...that's not entirely true." In physics, you start with Newton's laws of motion, and the world is made up of interacting objects in static space. Then one day you're introduced to relativity or quantum mechanics, and suddenly you find that every (and I mean every) equation or concept you learned wasn't quite true. They were approximations, and because they are useful and easier to digest than the harder stuff, you're taught them as fact. In Math you're taught simple Euclidean geometry; till you learn about non-Euclidean geometry, and suddenly everything you were told is impossible, isn't. In Geography you learn about countries with clear-cut borders and well-established capitals; till you delve in deeper, and get tangled in the mess of international affairs, with hazy boundaries and ever shifting allegiances. In English you start out learning that poems are rhyming and metered, as opposed to the plain text of prose; then you start reading poems that break form, don't rhyme, and sometimes (see: e.e. cummings) can't even be pronounced.

There's nothing surprising about any of that. Just the simple fact that learning takes time, and no one is capable of understanding a difficult subject without building up to it. Where would we be if we learned E=mc^2 before F=ma? Or learned about hyperspheres and Kaluza-Klein manifolds without knowing about straight lines and circles? Or learned about the Israeli-Palestinian struggle for the West Bank without having already learned, on a map, where the Middle Eastern countries were? Or having the first "poem" you're ever introduced to be this:

                             r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
                   who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
               PPEGORHRASS
                                     eringint(o-
aThe):l
          eA
              !p:
S                                                         a
                       (r
rIvInG                         .gRrEaPsPhOs)
                                                      to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;

(r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r, by e.e. cummings)


Obviously, you'd go insane. There's just too much there, and it's too hard to even begin to appreciate complex things before you start with your simpler estimations. (I'm still not sure I appreciate that one...though I'm a big fan of cummings' stuff, at least when it's readable). Simplifications help, and we all need them, at least at first. And it's hard to question the ethics of it; we all know, going in, that what we're learning isn't the whole story.

But there's one field where that simplification can be dangerous -- life. Just like any other subject, life is too difficult for a child to grasp. The complexities and subtleties of life, like the "grasshopper" poem, are overbearing. But you can't put life on hold while you sit and ponder it. We're rational agents, and we need to make decisions immediately, even as kids. So parents and teachers do the only thing they can. They simplify. Moral greys become black and white, difficult theology is glossed over in favor of Bible stories, and whatever political or doctrinal affiliation the parent is a part of, is made to seem obvious and unparalleled.

I've already written about some of those simplifications. In politics it's particularly easy to see what I mean: Republicans villify Democrats as overly tolerant or downright immoral, Democrats villify Republicans as greedy or ignorant. On the other hand, we see our own side as reasonable, obvious, commonsense, or moral. It's how I grew up (no fault of my parents), even if I didn't realize it, and I'll bet it's how you grew up too. Were we really Republicans or Democrats when we were 13? It's easy to laugh now at the idea, but at the time we were pretty sure.

My question is, to what extent is this sort of sheltering necessary? And to what extent is it ethical? Some parents try to avoid "indoctrination" and end up raising confused, ruined kids with no guidance, shown too much of the world too early. Others justify everything with the ends (having a happy kid who shares your values) and shelter to the point of almost creepy deception. There has to be some sort of middle ground, but I don't see what it is. When the truth itself is difficult or offensive, but glossing it over is deceptive, how can you win?

Those aren't rhetorical. I really have no idea. I'm just glad I'm not a parent yet...as far as I know, anyway.