"Lies to children" is a perfectly good pedagogic approach. Adding caveats to every concept sucks time and energy from learning the broad themes of the subject.

"Lies to children" is a perfectly good pedagogic approach. Adding caveats to every concept sucks time and energy from learning the broad themes of the subject. When we teach people programming, we start with variables and loops and don't mention page faults and cache poisoning. The same goes for any field. Demanding nuance of a particular kind in history pedagogy, as you see often these days, is just a bad-faith "isolated demand for rigor" that has the effect of privileging the worldview of those demanding the selective nuance. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands...