Educators who employ lies-to-children do not intend to deceive, but instead seek to 'meet the child/pupil/student where they are', in order to facilitate initial comprehension, which they build upon over time as the learner's intellectual capacity expands.
The "lie-to-children" concept was first discussed by scientist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart in the 1994 book The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World as myths—a means of ensuring that accumulated cultural lore is passed on to future generations in a way that was sufficient but not completely true.
[6] In an interview promoting the book, Pratchett cautioned: "Most of us need just 'enough' knowledge of the sciences, and it's delivered to us in metaphors and analogies that bite us in the bum if we think they're the same as the truth.
[12] In Nonlinear Dynamics in the Life and Social Sciences, Jack Cohen discussed the application of lies-to-children to teaching evolution, including the notion of DNA's purpose as a "blueprint", stating that "[o]nly the search for universal features, while treasuring all the exceptional specifics, offers some hope of sketching out the general shape of the evolutionary process so that we can explain it honestly as a Lie-to-Children".
[13] Similarly, in Bioinformatics, Biocomputing and Perl, authors Michael Moorhouse and Paul Barry explained how the lie-to-children model may be utilized as a teaching technique for the concepts of protein, RNA, and DNA.
[22] They also listed criteria to avoid the pitfalls, such as ensuring that the teacher understands the truth beyond the lie-to-children, and having a "master plan" of a learning progression that the lies-to-children work toward.
[22] In a contribution to Teaching Bilingual/Bicultural Children, Haroom Kharem and Genevieve Collura asserted that the revelation of lie-to-children makes educators seem disingenuous and undermines students' respect for them.