Truthfulness and Education in childhood and adolescence

Truth as one of the great values of human morality, has been endorsed in different cultures, and regardless of national, religious, and cultural beliefs, it has been a concern for ethics advocates of all kinds. In the meantime, educational approaches to institutionalizing truthfulness have been important, albeit somewhat ambiguous. The present article seeks to establish the relationship between truth and education from two different perspectives. From the first perspective, education is done in order to gain the goal of truth and seeks to achieve truthfulness as the objective of education. From the second perspective, truthfulness, as a systematic norm, seeks to organize educational thinking and practice in a way that is consistent with reality. In the first section, seven strategies for institutionalizing truthfulness have been proposed, some of which focus on organizing the education space and some on the person who is educated. These tactical strategies include creating a safe psychological environment, modeling truthfulness, reinforcing truth-seeking and relying on evidence, reinforcing moral sensitivity to lies, and reinforcing moral reasoning. The second section also discusses the two metaphors of education as metaphors far from reality, and the unbalanced interaction is a realistic description of the teacher-trainee relationship.