An Open Letter to Children About the Things School Told You That Are Not True

This is written to children, or to the child that anyone who went to school still carries around. Nobody will hand it to you in a classroom, for reasons that will become clear by the end.

You have been told a number of things at school that are not true. Not small things. Not the date of a battle misremembered by a tired teacher. Large, structural things about how the world works, repeated so consistently and by so many adults that you have no reason to suspect them. Here are some of them.

History Is Not Made by Heroes

You were taught history as a sequence of names. This king unified the country. That general won the war. This inventor changed the world. It makes a good story and it is easy to examine on.

It is also mostly false. Large events are produced by millions of people changing what they do, slowly, for reasons of their own, and the famous name is usually the person who happened to be standing at the front when the wave broke. I have written about this as the great-man bias. The version of history you were given is a filing system mistaken for an explanation.

Grammar Is Not a Law

You were corrected for saying things "wrong." You were taught that there is a right way to spell, to conjugate, to place a comma, and that the right way is a fact like the boiling point of water.

There is no such fact. Language is a set of habits that a community happens to share, and it changes constantly; every "rule" you were taught was, a few centuries ago, a mistake someone made. Conventions are worth following because they help people understand you, and that is the whole of the reason. The moment someone tells you a usage is "incorrect" as though it were a law of nature, they are confusing a custom with a truth, and you are entitled to notice.

Geometry Is Not What Reality Looks Like

You spent years on proofs. Given these axioms, this theorem follows, always, with no exceptions, forever. It is beautiful and it is true, and it gave you a completely wrong picture of what knowledge is.

Almost nothing outside mathematics behaves like that. In the real world regularities are statistical, exceptions are everywhere, and the honest answer to most questions is "usually, and here is how often." You were trained on the one subject where certainty is available and then sent out to a world where it never is, without being told that the training was the exception. That is why so many adults look for the one rule that settles a question and are angry when they cannot find it.

The State Is Not Your Parent

School is run by the state, and school taught you about the state. Notice the conflict of interest.

You were taught that the government exists to serve you, that it is basically benevolent, that its founding was heroic and its wars were just. Some of this is sometimes true. But the government is an organisation, and organisations look after themselves first, and the account of the nation that a nation gives to its children is not a neutral document. It is the version the organisation would like you to believe. You will have to go and find the other versions yourself.

Effort Is Not Always Rewarded

You were told that if you work hard you will succeed. This is the lie that hurts the most later, so I want to be careful about it.

Effort matters. It is not nothing. But a great deal of what happens to people is luck: where they were born, what their parents had, which door happened to be open at the right moment, which talents the market happens to want this decade. Adults who did well like to attribute it to effort, because it is more flattering than luck, and they pass the story on. You will meet people who worked far harder than you and got far less, and you should not conclude that they did something wrong.

Why an Institution Has to Tell You These Things

Here is the part that matters, and it is not that your teachers are liars. Most of them believe all of this, because they were taught it too.

A school is an institution, and an institution tells the story that keeps the institution running. History with heroes is easier to teach and test than history with statistics. Grammar as law is easier to mark than grammar as custom. Geometry as the model of knowledge produces students who respect authority, because authority speaks in certainties. A benevolent state is what the state pays the school to describe. And "effort is rewarded" keeps thirty children working quietly at their desks in a way that "much of it is luck" would not.

None of these is a conspiracy. Each is the path of least resistance for an organisation that has to process a million children a year with the tools it has. But the effect on you is the same as if it were deliberate: you leave with a picture of the world that is tidier, more just, and more hierarchical than the world actually is.

What to Do About It

Not to despise your teachers, who gave you reading and arithmetic and a great deal else that is true.

Just this: hold what school told you about how the world works a little more loosely than what it told you about how to add. Ask, of each confident claim, who benefits from your believing it. And when you find one of these lies, do not be angry that you were told it. Be pleased that you can now see it, because most people never do.

There is a longer list of what school should have taught you instead. This letter is the shorter one: what it taught you that it should not have.