According to The Washington Post fatherhood means never having to say, “I don’t know.”

In what is surely an odd homage to fathers - published during the one week-end of the year children give them tokens of gratitude for not going out for a drive and never coming back, gambling away the grocery money, or making the entire family go without toilet paper – the WaPo follows Boston-based writer Doug Hardy and his son, Andrei, 12, as they traipse through the National Air and Space Museum.

Andrei asks his father what the disks on a heat shield are made of; dear old Dad unhesitatingly - and incorrectly - answers, “steel.” The WaPo tsktsks:

If it didn’t occur to Hardy to say, “I don’t know,” he’s not alone. The phenomenon of the “know-it-all dad” is a familiar one to the docents, curators and keepers of America’s museums and zoos. …

“Now that I think about it, I guess I make up stuff all the time,” he said. Only a few days earlier, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Andrei had asked how bronze statues were made. Hardy finessed an explanation based on half-remembered notions of wax molds and plaster.

“It was a total BS moment,” Hardy said. “But you’ve got to be the guy who has the answers, right? It’s a habit. What should I say, that I’m 51 years old and I used to know this 20 years ago? That’s not much of an answer.”

The gene that prevents a man from admitting he doesn’t know the answer to every question must reside on the Y chromosome right alongside the gene that prevents him from asking directions instead of driving around in circles, the price of gasoline be damned. Nonetheless, poor Andrei is more likely to get more misinformation in school – and about far more consequential matters than what a space capsule’s heat shields are made from – than from his Dad.

For instance, global warming is being taught as scientific fact in schools, with mandatory showings of Al Gore’s PowerPoint Presentation-cum-movie to inculcate young, impressionable minds in what is becoming a secular article of faith. Never mind that many scientists think global warming is a hoax. Or that many parents object to Gore having the last – really the only – word on the subject.

Fortunately, some students, such as Kristen Byrnes of Portland, ME, refuse to swallow Gore’s global warming propaganda whole. As a project for her Honors Earth Science class, Byrnes, 15, challenges the “sloppy science” on which Gore’s untenable truths are based on her Web site, “Ponder the Maunder.” One blogger, The Anchoress, is pushing for Gore to debate Byrnes on global warming. Should this debate ever occur, The Stiletto hopes someone films it so that schoolchildren can learn the real truth about global warming.

[Editorial Note: To “maunder” means to talk incoherently or aimlessly. Coincidentally, Maunder is also the surname of a British astronomer who studied sunspots; a growing body of evidence suggests that cyclical solar activity is the main cause of global warming.]

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