I had an old teacher who, when you said something you thought was very smart, would say, "That's an exaggeration in the direction of truth." I have always thought that was the best definition I have ever heard of the academic enterprise.-- Jonathan Z. Smith

In "The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines" by Jonathan Z. Smith (U of Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning), we learn that the way we teach in college is often predicated on two great "lies" about knowledge, both of which hide the "process" of knowledge behind the viel of a finished, easily-delivered product.

One, we're often guilty of the "little white lie" that "consistently disguise[s], in our introductory courses, what is problematic about our work." We simplify ideas to deliver them in the classroom -- presenting knowledge as monolithic, rather than constructed by scholars working in the discipline over time.

A grander -- but a bit more confusing -- lie that Smith sees perpetuated by college teaching is the "disciplinary lie" that one can master a discipline without following a step-by-step process of "unmasking" assumptions about it. This lie he calls "necessary" but suggests that it is a symptom of the institutional structure of academia.

I'm not sure I completely understand his argument, but Smith seems to be suggesting that we are teaching our students to "fake it till you make it" -- but in the process we are teaching them to just be fake.

I enjoyed this article because I hadn't really thought much about how what I'm doing is lying, even when I'm teaching what I believe to be the truth. Perhaps "lie" is an overstatement -- a loaded word just to get us to think differently. What he means is ideology. Of course, teaching writing circumvents such "lies" to some degree, because I try to help students learn how to "unmask" assumptions through critical thinking, and I focus on their writing as a process that moves toward a finished product, rather than on the end product itself. We also consistently talk about education itself, exploring ideologies and assumptions by both cultures and individuals. But what lies I tell in literary criticism, when I cram post-structuralism into a one-hour lecture! Obviously, the idea is to arm them for their own research, but guided research isn't always as well-integrated into my course curricula as it could be, in non-writing courses.

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