The interesting thing about teaching is that you don’t always have to give students the truth for them to find their way. The simple obvious truths are usually overrated. Occasionally you have to ambush them, and steal their attention with misdirection. Sometimes the provocation for students to do their own important thinking comes from outright falsehood, sometimes from ambivalence, sometimes from overstating a case, sometimes from understating a case, playing devil’s advocate, etc. A good teacher doesn’t just spoon feed the answers or set ‘good examples’ but often lies like a bandit to get ideas across. Sometimes the mere hint of truth is all it takes to encourage an evolving intellect, and sends it careening across the wide imaginative universe. Good teachers can hide that truth in many ways to make it a challenge for students to find, and then properly own. Unless its earned by them it will always be someone else’s truth. Because, sometimes the important stuff stays mostly hidden in the shadows, and you need to look less at what’s staring you in the face and more at what is only implied between the lines….. Sometimes you have to put two and two together and not simply expect it to always equal four: Parts of the question only lead to parts of the answer, and maybe there’s more to be said than we’ve heard. When it looks obvious, that’s the time for us to be most suspicious that we are missing something. Like a riddle wrapped in an ambush in a Bogart mystery….. Teach like a bandit.
CARTER GILLIES POTTERY 
Okay, so here’s the gunman waiting behind the chair in the darkened corner:
We are naturally inclined to accept authority even when its unjustified.
The shot I was aiming was that we are less inclined to do our own thinking if someone we trust tells us something is fact or truth. Teachers can break through this mindless adoration by FORCING students to come to their own conclusions. Good teachers do this all the time, when its important not just to convey information but to encourage independent and responsible thinking. Teachers who only put themselves out as the correct model for thought and behavior are even worse bandits, since they are only interested in what they themselves have to say…….
And so interestingly we get these lessons in autonomy not just from good teachers but by having an ounce of skepticism in the face of Nimrods. We also get these rude awakenings from the outrageous posturing of complete imbeciles. Sometimes a real doofus will spout off about something as if they were laying down the gospels, and its only sink holding onto that lodestone of aimless pontificating or swim on your own to get as far away as fast as you can…..
From NPR:
Why Murder Philosophers?