Chapter 2

Not Everything We're Taught is True

Children are eager to learn. What they learn depends upon their environment. Different children are exposed to different situations and teachings. Formal teaching is often focused and encouraged. At other times learning is inadvertent. What children learn becomes a belief structure that affects their behavior and their expectations. Unfortunately, they are sometimes taught to believe things that aren’t true—things about both themselves and their environment.

Imagine that a group of children is taken at the time of birth and placed in a special institution. Their new home is in a remote location apart from the rest of society. These children live in a community that is both autonomous and self-supporting. They will stay at this place until they reach the age of twenty-one.

While at this institution, the children will not be abused either physically or emotionally. They will learn to participate socially and will be expected to assume various responsibilities necessary to maintaining the community. They will also be educated.

The things they will learn during this educational process will be different than what we teach our children. With respect to language, they will be taught incorrect grammar and inaccurate spelling. They will further be taught that adjectives commonly considered obscene by our society are gracious terms of endearment. With respect to math, they will be taught incorrect multiplication tables that cannot be proven mathematically, but must be learned by rote. They will be taught that physical exercise is potentially harmful and that excess body weight is desirable in fighting disease and malnutrition. In their science classes, they will learn that the universe is limited to the earth and its satellites. Because they are taught to believe sunlight is harmful to human beings, their schedule will be to sleep during the day and to spend their waking hours during the darkness.

They will finally be taught they’re elite. They will be told that the education they’re receiving is superior to that which is available in the larger society. They will be cautioned against allowing our unenlightened society to change their beliefs after they leave the institution. In addition, these young adults will be charged with sharing the benefit of their education with the larger society. Then they will be released to go their separate ways as they return to our society.

Try to imagine the impression these young adults would make on the rest of us. Their speech would be handicapped by sentence structure that would make them sound like fools. Their well-intentioned obscenities would likely provoke immediate rejection. Their written communication would be unintelligible because of the way they’d been taught to spell. Their eating habits and avoidance of exercise would make them generally unattractive physically. Their math training would make them dysfunctional in dealing with monetary concerns. If they were going to participate in our society, they would have to risk exposure to the harmful sunlight in order to interact with us. How would we view these young people?

They, like us, were taught about themselves and about their environment. Because they trusted their teachers and each other, they accepted the validity of what they had learned. Some of what they learned would handicap them socially. Other beliefs would damage their health. Their ability to overcome the effects of what they had learned and to function in a healthy lifestyle would ultimately depend on their willingness and ability to question the validity of what they’d been taught. Their willingness to do this would be initially handicapped by their belief that they were elite. They had been warned that our larger society would attempt to challenge their beliefs. Even if they eventually realized their education was detrimental to them, they would continually need to strive to overcome the effects of its conditioning. Four times six would instinctively be something other than twenty-four. It would have been easier for them if they had been taught nothing rather than to have been so well-taught what they learned.

While the preceding situation is hypothetical, we have all seen people hurt by behavior motivated by flawed societal beliefs. The belief, for example, of the superiority of one sex or the other. Or of one race or another. People died from blood-letting because we believed it helped. People shortened their lives by smoking because they had believed it wasn’t harmful. Our behavior is frequently determined by our beliefs and values. In a very real sense, we believe what we are taught to believe. We learn in many different ways.

We can learn from something as inanimate as a rock in the middle of a mountain trail that tells you to pick up your feet when you’re walking. “If you don’t,” it tells you, “you’ll fall on your face.” You might get the identical message from someone who’s walked the trail before and cautions you about the rocks. In either event, the teacher or messenger is irrelevant to the message. The wisdom of the message or lesson is sound whether you get it from the rock, from someone you like, from someone you hate, from someone you trust, or from someone who wants you to be watching your feet so you’ll hit your head on an over-hanging limb.

During our lives each of us encounters a variety of teachers. Some of them have a single message. Most have more than one. For whatever particular reasons of our own, we tend to trust certain people more than others. Because of that, we are more inclined to accept and believe their messages than we might be if it had come from someone we distrust. The danger of failing to distinguish between messengers and the messages they offer is two-fold. First, we may refuse to believe a wise, honest, and truthful message simply because we find the messenger unattractive or dubious. Conversely, we may embrace unwise, dishonest, and inaccurate teachings simply because we find the teacher attractive or compelling. These circumstances can and do adversely affect our belief structures. The beliefs we embrace, whether true or not, affect the way we live our lives. They affect our worldview and our motivations. Because of the nature of particular messages, our believing them will falsely affect our sense of who we are, what we’re worth, and how secure we are.

Life is a series of relationships. We relate to the people and things around us. Each of them is a messenger. Each of them teaches us about ourselves, about themselves, and about others. What we’re taught can either enhance or inhibit our sociability. Some beliefs can enhance or inhibit our healthy growth.

Just as the children learned their faulty multiplication tables by rote, each of us has accepted certain beliefs about ourselves and our environment that cannot be proven. We’ve learned them by rote simply because they were taught through repetition and not because there was any basis in truth for believing them. Faulty beliefs of this kind, though they’re almost universally accepted, continue to plague the lives of many people in our society, rendering them either socially afraid or in another way unhealthy. Because of that, we sometimes see ourselves or others as inadequate or as worthy of rejection rather than as victims of bad information. We, like the hypothetical children, have been preconditioned to believe certain teachings. It’s important that we be willing to challenge the validity of firmly held, though entirely assumed, beliefs.

The distinction between teachers and the lessons they teach is absolutely critical to understanding the message contained herein. It is equally critical to under stand that an invalid, untrue, or damaging lesson does not at all imply the teacher was in any way intentionally cruel, deceitful, or corrupt. Almost all of the damaging beliefs we teach others were first taught to us. We simply pass them along, becoming first the victims of them and then the perpetrators. Not because we’re bad, but because we do such a good job of learning what we’re taught.