A textbook case

Jonathan Wells, in his "Icons of Evolution", cites misleading statements textbooks in his opposition to evolution. When we look at the actual facts presented in scientific papers, we find that his objections to evolution are without merit.

However, he makes a brilliant case for objecting to the state of textbooks.

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Textbooks labor under one major disadvantage – it takes a decade for new discoveries to make it from the professional journals to a textbook. Then, since textbooks are expensive, school districts like to keep them around as long as possible. As a result, few grade schoolers will read about any discoveries that emerged more recently than they did.

This piece in the Weekly Standard notes a major driving force in textbooks is political correctness. When accuracy is subordinated to multiculturalism, in addition to being subordinated to cost, problems arise.

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.

<snip> 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. <snip> 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.

Wells based his book on citations from textbooks. Using other textbooks as his source, he could have come up with at least as many "icons" about history, geography, physical science, and probably anything else that appears in primary and secondary school textbooks. If we question evolution because of the way it's presented in bad textbooks, then we should be equally critical of geography, physics, chemistry, history, or anything else the textbook editors manage to fowl up.

Folks, the problem is bad textbooks. Fix that problem first, then we can argue over specific topics – and students will be much better equipped to make, and profit from, these arguments.