Lie-to-Children

A lie to children is a simplified, and often technically imprecise, explanation of a complex or technical subject that is deliberately used as a teaching method rather than as an attempt to deceive. The idea is that an incomplete model can meet learners where they currently are, giving them a workable foundation that is refined or replaced later as their understanding grows, and the technique is common in teaching biology, evolution, bioinformatics and the social sciences. The scientist Jack Cohen and the mathematician Ian Stewart introduced the term in their 1994 book The Collapse of Chaos, describing such simplified explanations as a kind of useful cultural myth, and later popularized it further with the author Terry Pratchett in The Science of Discworld, where they argued that any explanation simple enough for a human mind to grasp must in this sense be a lie to children. The concept treats this kind of simplification as a necessary form of scaffolding in education, made for good reasons even though it remains, by its own definition, not quite true. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/