I really like the stuff that Paul Graham writes. Recently, he's written a piece called The other half of the "Artists Ship" in which he talks about the hidden costs of checks before making purchases or other decisions. Another Lies We Tell Kids talks about how kids are lied to all the time and how that's dangerous.

In Artists Ship, he gives an example that most companies can buy software for $1000 with only a manager's signature, but software that costs more requires a committee to convene and make the decision. The costs of dealing with those meetings to the vendor mean that (1) good vendors just won't bother, or that (2) it costs $50,000 just to make it through the process. The result, he argues, is that a piece of software that might cost $5000 ends up costing $50,000 because the vendor can't afford to sell it for less than that given the costs of the buyer's hoops. He goes on to recount another story of a start up that got bought by a large company. Good programs, he argues, like to work hard. They like to produce code. They want people to use it. Now. That's just what the programmers did in the start up. Get a good idea, code it up and push it out to the servers by lunch. And at lunch, more good ideas were generated as a result of the new code being in place. In the new company it takes two weeks for code to get approved to put on the production server. The cost here isn't just that new code doesn't get into production, it's that the programmers hate the company and don't write as much code.

I think that there are implications here for why people like to contribute to Open Source Software programming projects. I think too that these ideas are at play in schools both in how their byzantine purchasing practices mean that certain vendors specialize in selling to eduction because those who are interested merely in selling good products don't have the energy or manpower to deal with a university. This could also explain why it seems that stuff we get on our state contracts---be it a ream of paper or a laptop---often costs more than if we were to go out and buy it down the street.

The other piece is Lies We Tell Kids. His basic point is that we lie to kids about all kinds of things

One of the most remarkable things about the way we lie to kids is how broad the conspiracy is. All adults know what their culture lies to kids about: they're the questions you answer "Ask your parents." If a kid asked who won the World Series in 1982 or what the atomic weight of carbon was, you could just tell him. But if a kid asks you "Is there a God?" or "What's a prostitute?" you'll probably say "Ask your parents."

Graham goes on to quote Einstein:

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies: it was a crushing impression.

Crushing. At some point kids learn that adults have been lying to them about all manner of stuff. This works pretty well, he argues, until about 10 years old, but for 15 year olds. It sucks. We basically ask 15 year olds to live in a 10 year old's world. We lie about sex and drugs. We don't even say "They're dangerous." We say "Just say no." We don't say sex and drugs are really, really fun. This means that we can't also say "Sex and drugs are dangerous and the pleasure that they can give you have ruined lives of people lots smarter and with much better judgment than you have." In most states, we can't even teach kids how to use condoms, how effective they are.

For a disturbing account of how this plays out in schools, see Red Sex, Blue Sex. Get this:

Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

She goes on to quote a Mississippi delegate who said, "even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they’ve also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child." So for him, "making the decision to become pregnant" must mean "making the decision to have sex" since he doesn't want kids to know about contraception, and "taking responsibility" means "not having an abortion" rather than "not getting pregnant."

But I digress.

Another point that Graham makes is that he never remembered teachers in K12 schools ever saying "I don't know." It wasn't until he was in college that he ever heard a teacher say that. This is a huge problem. My friends who teach future math and science teachers are continually shocked at how little math and science many of these teachers understand. For example, I had a science teacher tell me that gravity was a function of a planet's speed of rotation. (It's really a function of the mass of the two objects.)

This is why I want to develop a curriculum in which teachers pretend to know nothing. This makes it OK if they know nothing. But more importantly, it models how, if you know nothing, you might go about learning it. Learning is what we need to teach kids because we don't have any idea what it is they'll need to know in 10 years. I do this in my classes. Rather than tell people the answer to the question, my question becomes "Yeah, how would you know that?" More often than not, the way that I came about knowing the solution, and more often, the solution that makes sense to me, is completely and utterly foolish for anyone else.

But basically, by lying to kids we're teaching them that adults can't be trusted. I, for one, am not likely to learn from people whom I know are lying to me. They may believe that it's in my best interest, but how can I know for sure?