Essay About Lie. Why Do Parents not Always Tell Us the Truth?

As a child, we are lied to a lot by our parents. We are told about teeth collecting fairies, giant bunnies, and how one day a year an obese man in a red jumpsuit isn’t considered stranger danger. Why did we believe in these far-fetched hero’s? Shultz answers this question with the theory of inductive reasoning, which is the strategy of guessing based on past experiences to come up with a solution that is probabilistically true (367).  In this example of believing in mythical creatures, you believe your parents because had not led you astray prior, they taught you major life milestones like learning how to walk how to talk how to read and how to write, so based off of your past experiences with your parents you trust them so when mom or dad tells you about the tooth fairy you believe them. 

But then what happens when that snarky eleven-year-old with black braces and a bowl cut tells you the tooth fairy isn’t real?  Did you believe him? Of course not. Shultz describes this phenomenon as confirmation bias which is described as “the tendency to give more weight to evidence that confirms our beliefs than the evidence that challenges them” (372). The evidence your parents gave you about the tooth fairy being real is more significant to you than the evidence given to you by the goth preteen, so due to confirmation bias you disregard the degenerate’s remarks about the tooth fairy and solely believe what your parents told you. Both confirmation bias and inductive reasoning are used in our everyday lives, whether it be believing in mythical monsters or just simply trying to make sense of something new.

When I was a child, I would believe everything, whether it be something on my shirt, or the word gullible on the ceiling, I was an easy kid to persuade. From kindergarten to 2nd grade I attended a catholic school. I would describe this school as a radical catholic school, our field trips were more protests than out of classroom learning experiences. In first grade we went to a planned parenthood march to basically yell at 18-year-olds making the hardest decisions of their lives. A very classy and admirable act by a school whose main slogan is treat people the way you would like to be treated. 

But as a kid I was in my own cocoon, I didn’t know other schools did field trips based on political agenda, I didn’t know that that was seen as extreme, I just did what I was told and that was that. My old principle Mr. Tosti was the closest thing to a dictator the catholic school system has probably ever seen, he was a spindly grey-haired man who wore a blue pin stripped shirt and light blue slacks; but don’t let this outfit deceive you, he was as strict as a military Sargent and had a heart similar to his hair color, gray. At the beginning of every week he would call everyone into the gym and talk about what makes you a child of god and what makes you distant from god. This included wearing your uniform, not getting a red face at the recess yard, always having faith in god, and never saying the lords name in vain. 

If you were to break any of these values Mr. Tosti would hear about. I still remember seeing my friends walk out of his office sobbing with their pink slips that they had to get their parents to sign saying they were “not children of god”.

At the end of second grade my mother decided to pick up a new job in the public school which meant that for third grade I would go to Devon elementary, the local public school. The first day I stepped foot inside of Devon I was extraordinarily nervous, was the principle going to crazier than Mr. Tosti, would Mr. Tosti find out that I didn’t wear my uniform even though I’m not under his authority anymore, I was a nervous wreck. 

Besides having the first day jitters, the school day was going great I met my teacher Ms. Littlewood who wore bright sundresses and looked like she was a part time model for “The Gap”, I ate in a cafeteria for the first time instead of just eating in the classroom and met one of my best friends in the world there. This day took a sharp turn for the worst when I was called into the principal’s office, my heart fell to the floor, I had never been called into the principal’s office before. I was screaming and crying as I was walked down to the office and that is when I met Dr. Tobin, my new principle. Dr.

Tobin was the closest thing to Mr. Rodgers I had ever seen he was a quiet, organized man who always wore perfectly tied bowties, grey corduroy pant, and a pure white dress shirt. When I walked in his office there were no pink slips no catholic propaganda, just drawings and paintings that the children gave him. I was in uncharted territory, instead of getting yelled at till I cried Dr. Tobin gave me some Devon Elementary stickers, instead of being told I was not a child of god, I was told that Devon is a loving environment, and instead of being given a permission slip to go to an anti-abortion rally, I was told about our yearly trip to the zoo. Dr. Tobin was nothing like my preconceived stereotypes of principles. 

This story about changing of schools relates to Shultz’s theory of inductive reasoning, before I attended Devon, I had one notion of what a school was like, and what a principle was like. Even though I only had this small sample size of schooling I used inductive reasoning and made a generalization that all schools were like my catholic school. Shultz tells a story about a famous philosopher Thomas Kuhn who believed that all swans were white. The reason Kuhn believed all swans were white was because every swan he had seen in his small sample size was white. Later his statement of all swans are white was debunked because of the discovery of black swans (372). In my particular case, the catholic school I attended was the a “white swan”, Mr. Tos