"Culture" crudSome state education agencies and many local school districts have vitiated or demolished the teaching of history and geography, and they often have replaced history courses or geography courses with fluffy, inane social-studies courses that allegedly deal with "cultures." (These maneuvers have figured prominently in efforts to create dumbed-down curricula and courses which are so simple-minded and vacuous that even the laziest and dimmest students will seem to be doing well.) Schoolbook companies have rushed to exploit the "cultures" fad by producing fluffy, inane social-studies books that display the word cultures in their titles. Here are reviews of two such books. |
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Reviewing Prentice Hall's World Cultures: A Global Mosaic -- Prentice Hall's writers evidently produced World Cultures in a few days, by haphazardly joining snippets of material that they had found in older books. World Cultures has little or nothing to do with the study of cultures, and the writers fail to provide any account of any culture anywhere. Indeed, they fail to present any coherent concept of what the word culture may mean, and they seem to imagine that a "culture" is a physical region or a nation-state. They also spike their writing with sectarian religious preaching and plenty of racism. [from The Textbook Letter, March-April 1994 (volume 5, number 1)] |
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Reviewing Fearon's World Geography and Cultures -- Don't be misled by that word "geography" in the book's title. The first of our two reviewers, a professional geographer, sees "no indication that anyone associated with the writing and editing of this book has any idea of what constitutes geography." Our second reviewer finds the book incoherent, inept and sometimes mystifying. [from The Textbook Letter, July-August 1994 (volume 5, number 3)] |
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