Terry Pratchett - The Globe

Indeed, the more 'fundamental' it becomes, the less true it gets. It is therefore no surprise that the most effective method we have yet devised for passing extelligence on to our children is a systematic series of lies. It is called 'education'.

We can hear the hackles rising even as we write, as quantum signals echo back down the timelines from future readers in the teaching profession turning to this page. But before hurling the book across the room or sending an offended e-mail to the publisher, ask yourself just how much of what you tell children is true. Not worthy, not defensible: true. At once you'll find yourself on the defensive: 'Ah, yes, but of course children can't understand all of the complexities of the real world. The teacher's job is to simplify everything as an aid to understanding ...' Quite so.

Those simplifications are lies, within the meaning we are currently attaching to that word. But they are helpful lies, constructive lies, lies that even when they are really very wrong still open the door to a better understanding next time round. Consider, for example, the sentence 'A

hospital is a place where people are sent so that the doctors can make them better'. Well, no sensitive adult would wish to tell a child that sometimes people go into hospital alive and come out dead. Or that often it's not possible to make them better. For a start, the child may have to go into hospital at some stage, and too big a dose of truth early on might make it difficult for the parents to persuade them to do so without making a fuss. Nonetheless, no adult would consider that sentence to be an accurate statement of what hospitals are really about. It is, at best, an ideal to which hospitals aspire. And when we justify our description on the grounds that the truth would upset the child, we are admitting that the sentence is a lie, and asserting that social conventions and human comfort are more important than giving an accurate description of what the world is about.

They often are, of course. A lot depends on context and intention. In Chapter 4 of The Science of Discworld we called these helpful untruths and half-truths 'lies-to-children'. They must be distinguished from the much less benevolent 'lies-to-adults', another word for which is 'politics'.

Lies-to-adults are constructed with the express purpose of concealing intentions; their aim is to mislead. Some newspapers tell lies-to-adults; others do their best to tell truths-to-adults, although they always end up by telling adult versions of lies-to-children.

In the twenty-fifth Discworld novel The Truth, journalism comes to the Disc, in the form of William de Worde. His career begins with a monthly newsletter sent to various Discworld notables, usually for five dollars each month, but in the case of one foreigner for half a cartload of figs twice per year. He writes one letter, and pays Mr Cripslock the engraver in the Street of Cunning Artificers to turn it into a woodcut, from which he prints five copies. From these small beginnings emerges Ankh-Morpork's first newspaper, when de Worde's ability to sniff out a story is allied to the dwarves' discovery of movable type. It is rumoured that the dwarves have found a way to turn lead into gold -and since the type is made of lead, in a way they have.

The main journalistic content of the novel is a circulation battle between de Worde's Ankh- Morpork Times, with its banner 'THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE', and the Ankh- Morpork Inquirer (THE NEWS YOU ONLY HEAR ABOUT). The Times is an upmarket broadsheet, running stories with headlines like 'Patrician Attacks Clerk With Knife (He had the knife, not the clerk)', and checking its facts before publishing them. The Inquirer is a tabloid, whose headlines are more of the 'ELVES STOLE MY HUSBAND' kind, and it saves money by making all the stories up. As a result, it can undercut its upmarket competitor when it comes to price, and the stories are much more interesting. Truth eventually prevails over cheap nonsense, however, and de Worde learns from his editor Sacharissa a fundamental principle of journalism:

'Look at it like this,' said Sacharissa, starting a fresh page. 'Some people are heroes. And some people jot down notes.'

'Yes, but that's not very—'

Sacharissa glanced up and flashed him a smile. 'Sometimes they're the same person,' she said.

This time it was William who looked down, modestly.

'You think that's really true?' he said.

She shrugged. 'Really true? Who knows? This is a newspaper, isn't it? It just has to be true until tomorrow.'

Lies-to-children, even the broadsheet newspaper sort, are mostly benign and helpful, and even when they are not, they are intended to be that way. They are constructed with the aim of opening a pathway that will eventually lead to more sophisticated lies-to-children, reflecting more of the complexities of reality. We teach science and art and history and economics by a series of carefully constructed lies. Stories, if you wish ... but then, we've already characterised a story as a lie.

The science teacher explains the colours of the rainbow in terms of refraction, but slides over the shape of the rainbow and the way those colours are arranged. Which, when you come to think of it, are more puzzling, and more what we want to know about when we ask why rainbows look like they do. There's a lot more to the physics than a raindrop acting as a prism. Later, we may develop the next level of lie by showing the child the elegant geometry of light rays as they pass through a spherical raindrop, refracting, reflecting, and refracting back out again, with each colour of light focused along a slightly different angle. Later still, we explain that light does not consist of rays at all, but electromagnetic waves. By university, we are telling undergraduates that those waves aren't really waves at all, but tiny quantum wave-packets, photons. Except that the 'wave-packets' in the textbooks don't actually do the job ... And so on. All of our understanding of nature is like this; none of it is Ultimate Reality.

The wizards were never quite certain where they were. It wasn't their history. History gets named afterwards: The Age of Enlightenment, the Depression. Which is not to say that people sometimes aren't depressed with all the enlightenment around them, or strangely elevated during otherwise grey times. Or periods are named after kings, as if the country was defined by whichever stony-faced cut-throat had schemed and knifed his way to the top, and as if people would say, 'Hooray, the reign of the House of Chichester - a time of deep division along religious lines and continuing conflict with Belgium -is now at an end and we can look forward to the time of the House of Luton, a period of expansion and the growth of learning! The ploughing of the big field is going to be a lot more interesting from now on!'

The wizards had settled for calling the time they'd arrived 'D' and, now, they were back there, in some cases quite suntanned.

They had commandeered Dee's library again.

'Stage One seemed to have worked quite well, gentlemen,' said Ponder Stibbons. 'The world is certainly a lot more colourful. We do seem to have, er, assisted the elves in the evolution of what I might venture to call Homo narrans, or "Storytelling Man".'

'There's still religious wars,' said the Dean. 'And still the heads on spikes.'

'Yes, but for more interesting reasons,' said Ponder. 'That's humans for you, sir. Imagination is imagination. It gets used for everything. Wonderful art and really dreadful instruments of torture.

What was that country where the Lecturer in Recent Runes got food poisoning?'

'Italy, I think,' said Rincewind. 'The rest of us had the pasta.'

'Well, it's full of churches and wars and horrors and some of the most amazing art. Better than we've got at home. We can be proud of that, gentlemen.'