This item appeared in The Textbook Letter for July-August 1999,
accompanying a review of Glencoe's schoolbook Responsible Driving.

Meet Deaf Kitty

Robert A. Pease

I recalled VanCourt's account when I looked at Responsible Driving. I must suspect that Responsible Driving was put together by the same people who produced Glencoe Pre-Algebra, because Responsible Driving has its own load of irrelevant ethnokitsch items and racial gimmicks, including eighteen that appear under the label "Cultural Crossroads." As examples:

• Page 6: "Some American Indian peoples used a travois to transport goods. A travois consisted of two poles tied together in the shape of a V with a net lashed between them. The point of the V was harnessed to a dog or a horse, and the pole ends dragged on the ground." Who cares? A travois has nothing to do with automobiles or with driving, and the writers of Responsible Driving don't even explain that dragging stuff along the ground was a terribly inefficient way to "transport goods." (A lot of people, but not those Indians, learned that stuff could be moved more easily on devices that had wheels.)

• In the "Cultural Crossroads" item on page 98 we find the claim that there were no refrigerated trucks until 1949, when a refrigerated truck was patented by a black man named Frederick McKinley Jones. False! Refrigerated trucks, with cargo spaces cooled by ice or by solid carbon dioxide ("dry ice"), existed long before 1949 -- and so did many other specialized trucks, all developed by inventors who mounted useful equipment on automobile frames. The writers of Responsible Driving, however, shun all of that cultural history: They don't even tell that fire trucks were introduced during the first decade of the 1900s, or that trucks were outfitted for use as ambulances or as gun platforms during World War 1. Their "cultural" item is really just a racial gimmick -- an excuse for misinforming the student about an inventor who was black.

• The item on page 209 delivers some ethnokitsch from ancient times, informing the student that the Babylonians, more than 4,000 years ago, built a tunnel under the Euphrates. The tunnel, 3,000 feet long, "was used only by pedestrians." Who cares? What does this have to do with driving?

• The "Cultural Crossroads" item on page 119 is a news bulletin: "Nettie S. Strange, an African-American, examines oil-well bore samples for indications of the presence of oil." Who cares? There are veritable regiments of technicians who do that same kind of work, and there are millions of people who learned to drive without ever seeing the phrase "oil-well bore samples." In any case, the writers don't even try to explain any connection between this Strange item and any culture. Do anthropologists regard bore-examining technicians as a distinct culture? (No -- they don't.) This item makes me recall Tom VanCourt's phrase "frequent, self-conscious, irrelevant references to blacks, women and other members of Victim groups."

• The "Cultural Crossroads" item on page 282 is another news bulletin: Sylvia Oneice Lowe, a "gifted African-American," works as a design engineer for the Ford Motor Company. Who cares? And what "cultural" group or "culture" is supposed to be involved here? The culture of people who design stuff for Ford?

• On page 36 the writers invent a "cultural" group that's a real humdinger -- movie stunt-women who are deaf! This "cultural" phenomenon is represented by one Kitty O'Neil, who seems to be a living, breathing lampoon of a Hire-the-Handicapped poster girl. Deaf people "can do anything," Kitty purrs. The writers of Responsible Driving neglect to point out that Kitty is wrong and that there are lots of things that deaf people can't do. (Would the student like to have a deaf poster-girl as a driving instructor?) Later in the book, the student will read that a driver shouldn't wear headphones because "you need as much information as possible when you drive -- and that includes what you may hear." How can the student reconcile that statement with Deaf Kitty's notion that hearing doesn't matter?

• On page 330 we read that the wheel "is believed" to have been invented by the Sumerians, more than 5,500 years ago. Fine, but what have they done for us lately? And why were those American Indians, five millennia later, still dragging their goods along the ground on poles?

• On page 350 a "Cultural Crossroads" article called "The High Cost of Fuel" presents factoids about Alaskan petroleum and the indigenous peoples of the far north. The characters who wrote this cultural gem failed to notice that in 1997, the year shown on the copyright page of Responsible Driving, the price of fuel in the United States was low, not high. In fact, the price of gasoline (corrected to take account of inflation) was lower in 1997 than it ever had been before!

Robert A. Pease is a senior engineer with National Semiconductor Corporation (in Santa Clara, California). He writes a regular column -- "Pease Porridge" -- for the magazine Electronic Design, and he has published two books: Troubleshooting Analog Circuits (1991) and How to Drive into Accidents -- and How Not To (1998). He undertook the latter book after one of his relatives was killed in a traffic accident.

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