Footnotes*
- Thread starter Dotsie
- Start date
Wow! I can’t believe I got it right! (Yes Rath, exclamation marks are a bit like a drug, when you start adding them to your life it is so difficult to stop! 
)
My footnote is…
*As humans, we have invented lots of useful kind of lie. As well as lies-to-children (‘as much as they can understand’) there are lies-to-bosses (‘as much as they need to know’) lies-to-patients (‘they won’t worry about what they don’t know’) and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn’t quite what they’ve been taught so far. “Yes, but you needed to understand that” they are told, “so that now we can tell you why it isn’t exactly true.” Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouse of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into University, of course, where is carefully dried and stored.
Mx
)My footnote is…
*As humans, we have invented lots of useful kind of lie. As well as lies-to-children (‘as much as they can understand’) there are lies-to-bosses (‘as much as they need to know’) lies-to-patients (‘they won’t worry about what they don’t know’) and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn’t quite what they’ve been taught so far. “Yes, but you needed to understand that” they are told, “so that now we can tell you why it isn’t exactly true.” Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouse of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into University, of course, where is carefully dried and stored.
Mx
