My blogging has been light and will continue to be so for a couple of weeks due to injuring my hand (ice-skating). But I stumbled the other day upon one of the best teaching examples ever with respect to Plato’s Republic, and I’ve simply got to share it.

So, we’re in the coffee shop, and a promising young student I’m reading the book with has brought a visiting friend of his along, a Chinese student. She is interested enough to sit in upon our discussion, and is apparently very sharp: she’s traveling the U.S. a bit between finishing her undergraduate education at a prestigious American institution and beginning her graduate work at another even more prestigious one.

We’re going over book III, and my American student is asking about the Noble Lie, and how that can go with philosophy. As a way of better approaching the subject, I recall Socrates’s earlier discussion of how parents often tell virtue-modeling tales to their children. These are often false in the sense of being fictional. Lamely grasping for contemporary examples, I mention “The Little Engine That Could,” and wanting to keep the Chinese student interested, I ask her for an example of a tale that Chinese parents tell their children.

What she says is that all the parents she knew growing up, including her own, told their children that they were adopted! The children are left to figure out for themselves, as American children often are with Santa Claus, that this isn’t the case. So most of them don’t until the later elementary years.

The benefit, obviously, is that it habituates the child to be more grateful for, and more fearfully obedient to, their parents. The lie better implants the Confucian teaching of honoring parents than telling the truth would.

Well! I’ve always been taken aback by the example of parental lying that Socrates briefly puts out there at the beginning of the entire education section (378c-d), in which parents and the other adults react to the first instance of a child fighting his peers by saying in shocked and sacrilege-pained tones something along these lines: “What is this? Raised voices? Threats of violence? Between fellow citizens! This has never happened before!” Unlike the truly preposterous Noble Lie (414c-415c), which requires children to believe that the bulk of their memories are mere dreams, this has always struck me as within the bounds, if barely so, of what you really could convince children of. We can see how certain practices by the strictest parents and communities we know approach it.

But this real-life Chinese practice is as radical, at least in certain ways. It is less radical in not requiring the child to disbelieve what her own emotions, and what she observes in the behavior of some other children, seem to be telling her about the human propensity towards fussin’ n’ fightin’, but as radical in its refusing to bet upon typical familial affection and patient discussion of discipline issues. Its being believed beyond the youngest ages obviously breaks down, the same way our Santa Claus lie would, if the number of parents who refuse to tell it rises above a certain number.

It’s funny to compare this lie with the Santa one. It underlines the contingency and voluntary character of the entire gift of parental care, whereas our Santa tale, having largely dispensed with the Christian content of Saint Nicholas’s example, takes pains to hide an extra-helping of parental love. The former suggests you would be alone in an unkind world were it not for your parents, whereas the latter says that you have someone good watching over you in addition to them. Those who know book VIII of the Republic can see that the spirit of the former tale is “oligarchic” in its fear of scarcity and emphasis upon authority, whereas the spirit of the latter is “democratic” in its assumption of abundance and emphasis upon liberality.

Now do note, I cannot find reference to this “you’re adopted” lie in casual internet searching. My searches mainly come up with American concerns about lying to adopted children, or the American debates about Chinese parenting prompted by the “Tiger Mom” essay by Amy Chua. (I did come across this worthwhile Emily Esfahani Smith piece about Chinese parental lying in general, which among other things notes a greater Chinese willingness to lie for collective goods that works alongside a lower tolerance of lying for individual ones.) So I’m guessing it is something more typical of this student’s particular inland region of China.

But it does seem, while I would never want to read Lolita with students anywhere, let alone in Tehran, that “reading Plato in Beijing” could be most instructive!