Give: Political Correction, Take: Science in Schools

[Aziraphale]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...e.asp?ID=17966

A Textbook Case of Junk Science
By Pamela R. Winnick
Weekly Standard | May 5, 2005

Several centuries ago, some "very light-skinned" people were shipwrecked on a tropical island. After "many years under the tropical sun," this light-skinned population became "dark-skinned," says Biology: The Study of Life, a high-school textbook published in 1998 by Prentice Hall, an imprint of Pearson Education.

"Downright bizarre," says Nina Jablonski, who holds the Irvine chair of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences. Jablonski, an expert in the evolution of skin color, says it takes at least 15,000 years for skin color to evolve from black to white or vice versa. That sure is "many years." The suggestion that skin color can change in a few generations has no basis in science.

Pearson Education spokesperson Wendy Spiegel admits the error in describing the evolution of skin color, but says the teacher's manual explains the phenomenon correctly. Just why teachers are given accurate information while students are misled remains unclear.

But then there's lots that's puzzling about the science textbooks used in American classrooms. A sloppy way with facts, a preference for the politically correct over the scientifically sound, and sheer faddism characterize their content. It's as if their authors had decided above all not to expose students to the intellectual rigor that is the lifeblood of science.

Thus, a chapter on climate in a fifth-grade science textbook in the Discovery Works series, published by Houghton Mifflin (2000), opens with a Native American explanation for the changing seasons: "Crow moon is the name given to spring because that is when the crows return. April is the month of Sprouting Grass Moon." Students meander through three pages of Algonquin lore before they learn that climate is affected by the rotation and tilt of Earth--not by the return of the crows.

Houghton Mifflin spokesman Collin Earnst says such tales are included in order to "connect science to culture." He might more precisely have said to connect science to certain preferred, non-Western, or primitive cultures. Were a connection drawn to, say, a Bible story, the outcry would be heard around the world.

Affirmative action for women and minorities is similarly pervasive in science textbooks, to absurd effect. Al Roker, the affable black NBC weatherman, is hailed as a great scientist in one book in the Discovery Works series. It is common to find Marie Curie given a picture and half a page of text, but her husband, Pierre, who shared a Nobel Prize with her, relegated to the role of supportive spouse. In the same series, Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, is shown next to black scientist Lewis Latimer, who improved the light bulb by adding a carbon filament. Edison's picture is smaller.

Jews have been awarded 22 percent of all Nobel Prizes in science, but readers of Houghton Mifflin's fifth-grade textbooks won't get wind of that. Navajo physicist Fred Begay, however, merits half a page for his study of Navajo medicine. Albert Einstein isn't mentioned. Biologist Clifton Poodry has made no noteworthy scientific discoveries, but he was born on the Tonawanda Seneca Indian reservation, so his picture is shown in Glenco/McGraw-Hill's Life Science (2002), a middle-school biology textbook. The head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, and Nobel Laureates James Watson, Maurice H.F. Wilkins, and Francis Crick aren't named.

Addison-Wesley, another imprint of Pearson Education, is so keen on political correctness that it lists a multicultural review board of nonscientists in its Science Insights: Exploring Matter and Energy, published in 1994 but still in use. Houghton Mifflin says it overemphasizes minorities and women to "encourage" students from these groups. A spokesman for Pearson Education blames the states for demanding multiculturalism.

If it's the states that impose multiculturalism, however, they're only doing the bidding of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1995, the academy published the National Science Education Standards, which, according to academy president Bruce Alberts, "represent the best thinking . . . about what is best for our nation's students." The standards (which explicitly place religion on a par with "myth and superstition") counsel school boards to modify "assessments" for students with "limited English proficiency" by, for example, raising their scores. They tell teachers to be "sensitive" to students who are "economically deprived, female, have disabilities, or [come] from populations underrepresented in the sciences." Teachers should especially encourage "women and girls, students of color and students with disabilities."

This "best thinking" of the nation's scientific elite is being used by nearly all the 50 states as they centralize their science standards. With 22 states now requiring statewide adoption of textbooks, big-state textbook markets are the prizes for which publishers compete.

A study commissioned by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 2001 found 500 pages of scientific error in 12 middle-school textbooks used by 85 percent of the students in the country. One misstates Newton's first law of motion. Another says humans can't hear elephants. Another confuses "gravity" with "gravitational acceleration." Another shows the equator running through the United States. Individual scientists draft segments of these books, but reviewing the final product is sometimes left to multicultural committees who have no expertise in science.

"Thousands of teachers are saddled with error-filled physical science textbooks," wrote John Hubisz, a physics professor at North Carolina State University at Raleigh and the author of the report. "Political correctness is often more important than scientific accuracy. Middle-school text publishers now employ more people to censor books than they do to check facts."

The aim of President Bill Clinton's Goals 2000 project, enacted nine years ago, was to make American students first in science literacy. It didn't happen. A study by the National Assessment governing board in 2000 found that only 12 percent of graduating seniors were proficient in science. International surveys continue to show that American high school seniors rank 19th among seniors surveyed in 21 countries.

Members of the scientific elite are occasionally heard blaming religion for the sorry state of science education. But it isn't priests, rabbis, or mullahs who write the textbooks that misrepresent evolution, condescend to disadvantaged groups, misstate key concepts of physics, show the equator running through the United States, and come close to excising white males from the history of science. Young Americans need to learn science, and they need to distinguish it clearly from Algonquin myth.

For those who are lazy, like myself:
School textbooks are obsessed more with being politically correct and delivering sound cultural histories than to actually give students facts to work with. Rather than going into what science classes are supposed to talk about, science, these text books tend to harp more on the ethnopolitical struggles of American people, educating students more about what pre-modern Native American tribes thought ushered in the changing seasons, as opposed to the actual changing elements of the Earth.

The article turns into a bit of a commentary, about how people are quick to jump all over religion when there is a mention of the Bible in a public school text book, or if textbooks have "this is just a scientific theory, not fact" printed in them ... but when the commentaries in public school text books are about Anti-Western and ante-Western cultures and religions, there cannot be enough of it in there.

It is one thing to educate students on something like this in a social studies class, or something like that... And even though I am often a champion of Christianity, philosophy, and religion, I also have a fond respect for the hard sciences and what they bring to the world. The bureaucratization of America's classrooms, through sub-standard Amercican textbooks, does more to destroy efforts of scientific discovery than anything else.

[mike27]

I am offended by the biology curriculum - namely, it's ludicrous assertion that babies come from the womb. I am going to lobby my local school board to start teaching the stork theory because that's what I believe is right.

[justaddcheese]

aight, here's how it should be, IMO:

in biology class, they teach the most currently accepted biological reason for the world, race, babies, etc. but recognize it's not totally 100% accepted and such. people need to just accept there is other shit out there. or maybe im just a dirty left wing canadian that would be shot in texas.....

[möbiustrip]

Can I cut through and remind everyone that elementary and middle-school students barely read their textbooks anyway? The vast majority of what I learned came from what the teacher wrote and said, especially in science. We were occasionally referred to the book for an exercise or two requiring no more than a few minutes to complete.

Why we're spending money on touchy-feely textbooks is a hell of a question, and the effective non-existence of books (good teachers recognize shit and don't use it) to accompany classroom learning might help explain our educational shortcomings. What somebody thought were "interesting" tie-ins to make science less boring get recognized as gay pap, even by eight-year-olds.

When students get older, we suddenly ask them to digest serious material instead of Sesame Street...no wonder it's "hard" and "boring."

This shouldn't be cast as a partisan issue; it's clearly reasonable to expect a textbook to contain its subject matter. Stray a little in either direction and people are at each others' throats.

[pigster]

Originally Posted by möbiustrip

This shouldn't be cast as a partisan issue; it's clearly reasonable to expect a textbook to contain its subject matter. Stray a little in either direction and people are at each others' throats.

Heh - what a concept, science books with science and math books with math.

(And to anyone doubting the veracity of the article, I'll be happy to post scans of my son's math book, which takes the interesting tack of illustrating problems with examples in Spanish, Russian and German )

[möbiustrip]

Originally Posted by pigster

(And to anyone doubting the veracity of the article, I'll be happy to post scans of my son's math book, which takes the interesting tack of illustrating problems with examples in Spanish, Russian and German )

u canot b serios

[pigster]

Originally Posted by möbiustrip

u canot b serios

I'll do some scans tonight (if he brought his book home)

[Crazyhun]

Originally Posted by möbiustrip

Can I cut through and remind everyone that elementary and middle-school students barely read their textbooks anyway? The vast majority of what I learned came from what the teacher wrote and said, especially in science. We were occasionally referred to the book for an exercise or two requiring no more than a few minutes to complete.

Why we're spending money on touchy-feely textbooks is a hell of a question, and the effective non-existence of books (good teachers recognize shit and don't use it) to accompany classroom learning might help explain our educational shortcomings. What somebody thought were "interesting" tie-ins to make science less boring get recognized as gay pap, even by eight-year-olds.

When students get older, we suddenly ask them to digest serious material instead of Sesame Street...no wonder it's "hard" and "boring."

This shouldn't be cast as a partisan issue; it's clearly reasonable to expect a textbook to contain its subject matter. Stray a little in either direction and people are at each others' throats.

Bolding mine.

That many students don't read the text book isn't the point. The point is the text is wrong. Most people don't read the tax code, but it still has to be correct.

Also, while good teachers do recognize crap when they see it, most teachers aren't very good, and they are only getting worse. Sit in on an Education class sometime and see what kind of people it attracted (I am not implying that all Education students are morons. But many of them are)

[SemperFly]

Science textbooks should be based in one thing: science. Culture and political correctness should never influence the information reported by science, ever. If the families of minority students or disabled students or whatever can't handle the hard science then they shouldn't be studying it.

Originally Posted by justaddcheese

aight, here's how it should be, IMO:

in biology class, they teach the most currently accepted biological reason for the world, race, babies, etc. but recognize it's not totally 100% accepted and such. people need to just accept there is other shit out there. or maybe im just a dirty left wing canadian that would be shot in texas.....

What accepted reason are you refering to and by whom is it not accepted?

[walkingcarpet]

My college biology book from a few semesters back has many, many pages of interviews composed of almost exclusively women and minorities, asking questions about how hard it was to get into the field of their study because of their race / sex, etc.

[ilkka]

Originally Posted by walkingcarpet

My college biology book from a few semesters back has many, many pages of interviews composed of almost exclusively women and minorities, asking questions about how hard it was to get into the field of their study because of their race / sex, etc.

Having 500 pages of junk in a text book doesn't matter. If some one is motivated to read that crap and then become a scientists, that's great. As long as the crap is clearly labled as such and segregated from the real material, either at the end of the chapter or in the beggining, it doesn't matter. The teachers just won't make that crap mandatory reading.

[auction1]

Originally Posted by Crazyhun

Bolding mine.

That many students don't read the text book isn't the point. The point is the text is wrong. Most people don't read the tax code, but it still has to be correct.

To be fair the US tax code has many, many contradictions when you actually read it. You've just got be able to cite those portions during your audit. My mother is a CPA and does a lot of corporate income tax filings, it's amazing some of the things she can get away with.

[möbiustrip]

Originally Posted by Crazyhun

Bolding mine.

That many students don't read the text book isn't the point. The point is the text is wrong. Most people don't read the tax code, but it still has to be correct.

Also, while good teachers do recognize crap when they see it, most teachers aren't very good, and they are only getting worse.

I'm saying students would read and teachers could use the book if it were correct and not padded with fluff. By contrast, in a college course you can largely get away with only reading a book and not going to class as much.

Sit in on an Education class sometime and see what kind of people it attracted (I am not implying that all Education students are morons. But many of them are)

Many are. Many will get a generic job and not be teachers.

[möbiustrip]

Originally Posted by ilkka

Having 500 pages of junk in a text book doesn't matter. If some one is motivated to read that crap and then become a scientists, that's great. As long as the crap is clearly labled as such and segregated from the real material, either at the end of the chapter or in the beggining, it doesn't matter. The teachers just won't make that crap mandatory reading.

There's no reason to pay for it. This is taxpayer-funded. Make it lean and mean.

[ilkka]

Originally Posted by möbiustrip

There's no reason to pay for it. This is taxpayer-funded. Make it lean and mean.

I doubt the cost of adding an additional page of fluff is very much. Sure, it would be much better if there were no crap in the text book in the first place, if only to make the books portable, but having special interest articles tucked away in some corner is hardly the end of the world, as long as it does not affect the actual science, etc.