Check Out the Textbooks Your Kids Are Using

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.

- Daniel J Boorstin

by Linda Seebach

Politicians aren't the only people who have their names on books they didn't write.  The same is often true of textbook authors, John Hubisz discovered in the course of a study of the egregious scientific errors found in widely adopted middle-school physics books.  "The notion of 'author' in these texts is quite foreign to us," writes Hubisz, a professor of physics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.  Of the people identified as such, "none that we contacted would claim to be an 'author,' and some did not even know that their names had been so listed."

The lengthy lists of authors, editors and consultants are attributable to the publishers' desire to present their books as authoritative and up-to-the-minute for the benefit of state and local officials who adopt textbooks and who are bedazzled by beautiful pictures and fantastic layouts.  "Committees produce mush," Hubisz says, "and it is very difficult to find anyone with the authority to make corrections."

What kind of errors?  When the study came out in January, news stories picked on easy targets such as the picture of Linda Ronstadt that appeared in a 1997 Prentice-Hall textbook identified as a silicon crystal doped with an arsenic impurity.  I have no idea what a silicon crystal doped with an arsenic impurity actually looks like - and I wonder whether a middle-student would understand what he was looking at if the picture were correct - but such a gaffe, no matter how embarrassing to the publisher, is not damaging to the students, who will not be inclined to make this misinformation part of their permanent understanding of physics.  But when they're misinformed about a subject they don't know much about - physics, that is - they are likely to stay misinformed for the rest of their lives.  Even if they take more physics courses, and most of them never will, their early misconceptions will persist.

Here are a few (from a hundred pages' worth) that persisted right into print:

Okay, so those (and thousands more in a dozen different books) are innocent mistakes.  Distortions for political reasons are not innocent, though understandable because offending some organised group will get a book killed much faster than merely incorrect scientific information.

One book tells its impressionable readers that "many scientists won't live near an overhead power line or sleep under an electric blanket."  Yeah, and they won't walk under ladders either.

The environmental hazards of nuclear power are played up, while the hazards of other technologies are all but ignored.  Another article about the possible cancer deaths due to a nuclear accident fails to point out that the largest dose "was half what folks in Colorado get naturally."

And we haven't even started on the effort to substitute emotion for knowledge.  In one book with an incorrect diagram of a lunar eclipse, students are asked whether they have experienced an eclipse and told to write stories about their feelings.

They surely won't be able to write intelligently about the facts.

"Students come through school with a strong dose of mystical thinking," Hubisz concludes.  This study originated, in part, when one parent tried to get an explanation for the errors in his daughter's science book, and got a runaround instead.  Check out the books your children are using.

Source: "Opinions" 2 June 2001 © 2001 Nando Media and Scripps Howard News Service

Speaking of School

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.

- Alec Bourne

by Howard Zinn

I am a teacher and a writer.  I understood early that what is presented as "history" or as "news" is inevitably a selection out of an infinite amount of information, and that what is selected depends on what the selector thinks is important.

Those who talk from high perches about the sanctity of "facts" are parroting Charles Dickens’ stiff-backed pedant in Hard Times, Mr Gradgrind, who insisted his students give him "facts, facts, nothing but facts."

But behind any presented fact, I had come to believe, is a judgment — the judgment that this fact is important to put forward (and, by implication other facts may be ignored).  And any such judgment reflects the beliefs, the values of the historian or reporter, however he or she pretends to "objectivity."

Source: Anderson Valley Advertiser 8 July 1998

Source: USA Today Friday 17 August 2001

July 4th Basics Lost on Some Teens

Information is not knowledge.

- Albert Einstein

by Michele Healy

A large number of teens in the USA are fuzzy about the history behind Wednesday's Independence Day celebration.  A survey of 1,000 teens, conducted by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the education institution that operates the restored 18th century capital of Colonial Virginia, finds 22% don't know what country the United States declared Independence from in the Revolutionary War (14% say France), 17% don't know there were 13 original colonies, and 15% don't know that the Declaration of Independence was adopted on 4 July 1776 by the Continental Congress.  The history gap isn't limited to issues of independence.  Nearly 1 in 4 don't know who fought in the Civil War (13% say the United States and Great Britain).

Source: USA Today Tuesday 3 July 2001

What Does It Mean to Be Schooled?

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

- Henry Adams
 

The Internet may reduce effective choice while increasing options.  In the rapidly changing world we live in, it may be competency to learn new skills rather than the skills themselves that we need to focus on.

I read in The Evening Post 21 February 1996 an article entitled “Auckland Pupils Most Ignorant — Digest Survey” which said that a Reader’s Digest survey of 17-year-olds across the country revealed that 97% didn’t know what year Captain James Cook arrived in New Zealand (1769) and more than half didn’t know when the second world war had ended (1945).  A full 41% couldn’t name a single cabinet minister.  Only 1/3 of them could name two.

Wouldn’t the century Cook arrived and the decade the second world war ended actually be sufficient?

Auckland students scored lower than others on history and grammar questions.  Reader’s Digest, who surveyed 411 seventeen-year-olds across the nation, said the study "vividly demonstrates the urgent need to improve education standards."  New Zealand 17-year-olds were worse on their own history and on literature but scored better on geography, environmental issues and mathematics.  The article said that an educator named John Graham, chairman of a private college for teenagers, had said the results were of great concern and showed that the system had drifted too far in teaching kids issues; instead, they needed "a sound body of knowledge."

One of the questions asked in what year Christchurch hosted the Commonwealth Games (1974).  Another asked in which novel did the daughters of the Bennet family find husbands (Pride and Prejudice).  These questions are just like the ones asked in the pubs on Trivia Night — because that’s just what they are — trivial.  Give me geographers, environmentalists and mathematicians over school educators any day!

Roger Schank, computer science professor at Carnegie-Mellon, wrote in his January "Edge" question [see www.edge.org]: "When we choose to teach our high schoolers trigonometry instead of say basic medicine or business skills, it can only be because we think that trigonometry is somehow more important to an educated mind or that education is really not about preparation for the real world.  When we focus on intellectual and scholarly issues in high school as opposed to more human issues like communications, or basic psychology, or child raising, we are continuing to rely upon outdated notions of the educated mind that come from elitist notions of who is to be educated.  While we argue that an educated mind can reason, curiously there are no courses in our schools that teach reasoning.  When we say that an educated mind can see more than one side of an argument we go against the school system which holds that there are right answers to be learned and that tests can reveal who knows them and who doesn't."

What Kids Know

by Mark Goldblatt

It's a freshman writing assignment I give every semester: "Respond in your journals to the following quotation: 'Religion is the opiate of the masses.'"  After the students copy the words into their notebooks, I ask them to name the author.  I do this now out of a mixture of curiosity and masochism; very likely, none of them will know.  In the 10 years I've been assigning the quotation, only 5 students have immediately identified Karl Marx as the author - and all 5 were foreign students.  So as usual, in the semester just ended, after the initial silence, I offered them a hint: the author was German.

They pondered this for a moment.  Finally, an older black student named Maxine raised her hand.  "Was it Martin Luther?"  The class roared with laughter.  Their reaction puzzled me.  It didn't seem such a bad guess.  Luther was German, and he did write about religion.  As Maxine glanced around, another student tapped her on the shoulder.  "Don't you know he was a brother?"  The reason for the laughter suddenly dawned on me.  The entire class had assumed Maxine meant Martin Luther King - their jaws dropped as I explained who Martin Luther was.

That moment has stuck with me because it highlights what, to my mind, are the two great problems with students now entering college.  The first is familiar enough: they don't know what they should know.  The second is more subtle yet even more worrisome: they assume they know much more than they actually do know.  In this instance, not only did the students fail to identify arguably the most famous quotation of the last two centuries, or to recognise the name of the leader of the Protestant Reformation, but they felt secure enough to laugh at an educated guess far closer to the mark than they realised.

Through the years, we've grown accustomed to New York City's students lagging behind the rest of the country's on standardised tests; accustomed, as well, to American students getting blown out of the water by their peers in Far East or European countries - or, indeed, in any country where hunger does not eclipse education as a parental concern.  Less familiar are surveys in which American students show markedly higher rates of satisfaction with the poor education they are receiving; they are, in other words, utterly ignorant of their own ignorance.

It is a trend that should worry us because, unlike in the past, ignorance is no longer tempered with humility.  Rather, after years of psychotherapy disguised as pedagogy, ignorance is now buoyed by self-esteem - which, in turn, makes students more resistant to remediation since they don't believe there's a problem.  This resistance, indeed, is part and parcel of a wholly misplaced intellectual confidence that is the most serious obstacle to their higher education.  For the last two decades, I've taught freshman courses at CUNY and SUNY colleges in the city; the majority of my students have been products of the city's public schools.  I am saddened, therefore, to report that more and more of them are arriving in my classes with the impression that their opinions, regardless of their acquaintance with a particular subject, are instantly valid - indeed, as valid as anyone's.  Pertinent knowledge, to them, is not required to render judgment.

Want to scare yourself?  Sit down with a half-dozen recent public high-school graduates and ask them what they believe.  Most are utterly convinced, for example, that President Kennedy was murdered by a vast government conspiracy.  It doesn't matter to them that they cannot name the presidents before or after Kennedy.  Or the three branches of government.  Or even the alleged gunman's killer.  Most are convinced, also, that AIDS was engineered by the CIA - even though they cannot state what either set of initials stands for.  Most will voice passionate pro-choice views on abortion - even though they cannot name the decision that legalised it.  Or report the number of judges on the Supreme Court.  Or define the word "trimester."  Most will happily hold forth on the hypocrisy of organised religion - even though they cannot name the first book of the Bible.  Or distinguish between the Old and New Testaments.  Or state the approximate year of Jesus's birth (a trick question).  Most will bemoan global warming - even though they cannot name three greenhouse gases.  Or convert Fahrenheit temperatures to Celsius.  Or say what planetary phenomenon causes seasons.

Let me stress that I'm not talking about stupid kids - though yes, as painful as it is to acknowledge, there are in fact stupid kids.  But in this case I'm talking about bright kids, talented kids, curious kids - kids who will occasionally concoct ingenious, if wrongheaded, theories to compensate for what they don't know.  Several years ago, for instance, a student of mine suggested that a semi-colon got its name because it drew attention to the words around it.  She thought the spelling was: "See me colon."  Clearly, if she's clever enough to come up with that, she's clever enough to learn the proper use of semi-colons; it's just that no teacher ever bothered to correct her punctuation.

She, and students like her, have been robbed - and not simply of the instruction they should have received through 12 years of primary and secondary schools.  They have been robbed of their entrée into serious cultural debate.  Robbed even of the realisation that they are stuck on the outside looking in.  They are doomed to an intellectual life of cynicism without ever passing through knowingness, a life in which they grasp at platitudes to resolve momentary disagreements and do not possess the analytical wherewithal to pursue underlying issues.

They are lost generations.  It's too late for them to catch up.  But we owe it to their children to do better.

Mark Goldblatt teaches at SUNY's Fashion Institute of Technology.  His new novel is Africa Speaks.  This essay first appeared in the New York Post three years ago.

Source: www.nationalreview.comNational Review 3 September 2002

I'd like for Mr Goldblatt to explain just why it is these bright kids are "stuck" on the outside.  If they haven't learned something by the time they're freshmen at university, then they'll never contribute to serious cultural debate?  Personally, I don't think you even become a mature adult until 30.  That leaves a few years for experience to fill in some of the important gaps.  Bright minds learn - not always what was intended, perhaps - but school is seldom a total waste - certainly not for just those reasons Mr Goldblatt perceives.  It is not unusual that a teacher would assign a great deal of importance to structured education.

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