Editor's File

William J. Bennetta

New Books for Old

An official of the Millcreek Township School District (in Erie, Pennsylvania) reports that Prentice Hall has offered compensation for hundreds of copies of a defective, error-laden text that the district bought from Prentice Hall two years ago. According to Alan Zito, Millcreek's supervisor of secondary education, the company intends to furnish the district with revised books that supposedly will carry fewer factual errors, pedagogic mistakes and other faults.

The defective text is the 1995 version of Prentice Hall Exploring Physical Science, which Prentice Hall sells for use in middle schools. The Millcreek district bought nearly 600 copies of it in 1994, and the district's teachers soon recognized that it contained many serious flaws. With help from Howard P. Lyon, a local parent, the district eventually published a partial list of the book's deficiencies, plus pertinent corrections; and Prentice Hall paid $2,050 to the district to offset some of the costs involved in printing the list and distributing it to students. (See the March-April issue of TTL, page 10.)

Now Prentice Hall wants to replace the defective books outright, Alan Zito told me during a recent telephone interview: The company has proposed to deliver to the district, at no charge, some 600 copies of a new, cleaned-up version of Prentice Hall Exploring Physical Science, Zito said. The new version presumably will be printed later in this year and will show 1997 as its copyright date.

After my conversation with Zito, I attempted to get more information about this matter from Jane Antoun, who is an executive of Prentice Hall's parent company, Simon & Schuster. Antoun had sent a letter to the Millcreek district, on 5 June, proclaiming that Simon & Schuster would be pleased to "resolve the issue" surrounding Prentice Hall Exploring Physical Science, though she didn't explicitly say what the issue was, or what the resolution might be. I hoped that she would tell me what her letter meant, and that she would confirm or clarify the account that I had received from Zito. I also wanted to ask her this: Will Simon & Schuster offer revised books to other school districts that bought the 1995 version of Prentice Hall Exploring Physical Science?

Antoun didn't return my telephone calls.

Educators who are using the 1995 version may want to try their own luck at contacting Antoun, to find out whether they can expect to receive replacements. Her address is: Jane Antoun, president, secondary education, Simon & Schuster Education Group, 1 Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458. Her telephone number is 201-236-5401.

The Prophet's Women

Bogus material about Muhammad and the origin of Islam has already appeared in Prentice Hall's book World Cultures: A Global Mosaic. Now some closely similar material is being disseminated in Prentice Hall World History: Connections to Today, a high-school book dated in 1997. Prentice Hall's writers again present the myth of Muhammad's "vision" as if it were history, and their tale again includes (among other things) a scene in which Muhammad's wife, Khadija, urges him to accept his supernaturally ordained mission as "the messenger of God."

But what about all his other wives? The Prentice Hall book doesn't say anything about them, even though they represent an important aspect of Muhammad's life. After Khadija's death (which occurred when Muhammad was 49 years old), Muhammad turned to polygamy, pursued it with notable vigor, married at least eight women, and seemed not to be troubled by the Quran's declaration that a man could have no more than four wives at a time. No one knows exactly how many wives he had, because some cases are ambiguous: The women may have been married to Muhammad, or they may merely have served as concubines.

Prentice Hall's sanitized account leaves the impression that Khadija was Muhammad's only wife and the only woman who had a role in the development of Islam. In fact, however, a later wife whose name was Aisha (and whose marriage to Muhammad had been consummated when she was nine years old) became an important leader of Islam after Muhammad died.

Readers who want to learn more about Muhammad's matrimonial ventures will be well rewarded if they consult chapter 4 of Geraldine Brooks's book Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, published in 1995 by Doubleday (New York City). The chapter is titled "The Prophet's Women," and it includes this amusing insight: Some of Muhammad's "divine revelations" about women were remarkably coincident, in both time and content, with his own sexual impulses and with his need to maintain order in his polygamous household.

By the way, Prentice Hall's history book also repeats the claim that Muslims today believe in the same god that is worshiped by Jews and the same god that is worshiped by Christians. That claim, presumably intended to make Islam seem friendly, is absurd.

Eggs à la Dumb

According to Chinese folklore, an egg will balance on one end on the vernal equinox. Students from Midtown West School in New York City successfully put ancient wisdom -- and practical physics -- to the test with the help of Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 60th Street in Manhattan.

It was a fake. The unfortunate students shown in the photo had been exploited in a publicity event staged on 20 March by New York City's park rangers. The event had nothing to do with physics or with "wisdom" or with any kind of test, and its only connection to "Chinese folklore" was artificial and twisted. The students had functioned, unwittingly, in the propagation of a New York City superstition.

The superstition in question can be traced to China, but the Chinese do not claim that "an egg will balance on one end on the vernal equinox." They believe that balancing an egg is especially easy on a day called Li Chun, which they consider to be the first day of spring. Li Chun comes in early February, about six weeks before the equinox.

The connection between eggs and the equinox was invented not in China but in Manhattan, after a magazine article (printed in 1945) introduced Americans to the Chinese notion that eggs behave oddly when spring arrives. This notion was quickly taken up by some gullible New Yorkers, who gave it an Occidental spin. They dumped Li Chun and substituted the vernal equinox -- perhaps because the equinox is regarded in the West as the beginning of spring, or perhaps because the equinox has special significance in Western astrology and sorcery.

Needless to say, the magic worked just as well in March as in February, because credulity and self-deception operate every day of the year. Just as the superstitious Chinese had convinced themselves that eggs would stand up on Li Chun, the superstitious New Yorkers convinced themselves that eggs would stand up on the equinox -- and they confirmed their belief by staging equinoctial egg-balancing ceremonies. But they never produced any evidence to suggest that eggs balanced more readily on the equinox than on any other day, so the ceremonies merely showed that the New Yorkers were adept at nourishing delusions.

Those delusions still persist, as Education Week has shown in its bogus report about the stunt at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street. That event, I have learned, was concocted by Bram Gunther, acting director of the Urban Park Rangers unit in the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. When I spoke with Gunther by telephone, on 26 April, I asked him what his purpose had been. He replied, "We were after fun and publicity for the Rangers." He said that the results of the students' efforts were "almost unanimous" and that "almost all the kids got their eggs to balance."

How thrilling!

But in response to some further questions, Gunther admitted that the students hadn't tried to balance eggs on any day but the equinox, so they had no basis for judging whether the equinox had anything to do with the results that they obtained.

The exploiting of unsuspecting youngsters for the sake of a cheap stunt is always deplorable, and it is worse if the stunt leads the youngsters to embrace superstition and nonsense. I hope that the directors of the Midtown West School will not again make their students available for such an event. I also hope that the editors of Education Week will stop promoting silliness and will stop presenting dumb antics as "physics."

Readers who would like to learn more about equinoctial egg shenanigans should read Martin Gardner's excellent article "The Great Egg-Balancing Mystery" in the May-June issue of Skeptical Inquirer. That article is the source of the historical information that I have given here.

Unilingual Education

More than 2,000 years ago, people in Asia discovered that certain black metallic rocks attracted iron. The Greeks and Arabs called these rocks lodestones, meaning "leading stones."

Of course, those were the good old days, when the Greeks and Arabs all spoke English.

A Welcome Rectification

The mistake was the NSTA's endorsement of an atrocious book called Biology Teacher's Survival Guide, which was issued in 1993 by something called "The Center for Applied Research in Education," a unit of Simon & Schuster. The Survival Guide promotes creationist hogwash, tells teachers to depict scientific findings and religious myths as if these were equivalent alternatives, and urges teachers to address the history of life in terms of "two main theories" called "evolutionism and creationism." The Survival Guide thus advocates the creationists' infamous "two-model" approach -- a purely religious invention that possesses no scientific validity and is unlawful in public schools.

Despite all this, the Survival Guide has been promoted in the NSTA's catalogue of publications, and copies of the Survival Guide have been sold by the NSTA at its national and regional conventions.

Now, however, the NSTA seems to have straightened things out. According to its executive director, Gerald F. Wheeler, the NSTA has withdrawn its endorsement of the Survival Guide and will no longer offer the Survival Guide for sale.

It is hard to guess why the NSTA decided to plug the Survival Guide in the first place, because the book is utterly brainless. It was written by one Michael F. Fleming, who evidently has no idea that science is an intellectual endeavor. He seems to imagine that the teaching of biology is a sort of administrative function, and that a teacher can fulfill this function by merely consuming time, dispensing amusement, and avoiding inconvenience.

The Survival Guide has 277 pages but little substantive content. About 100 pages offer "worksheet activities," which consist of mindless quizzes and juvenile puzzles. The rest of the book comprises laboratory exercises (indistinguishable from the ones that appear in typical biology textbooks or life-science textbooks), advice about administrative tasks (such as making a seating chart), and instructions for elaborate, empty pastimes (such as using cakes and candies for making edible models of anatomical structures, or making costumes that enable students to disguise themselves as cells or organs). All in all, Fleming's material ranges from the inane to the idiotic.

Fleming's notions about teaching "evolutionism and creationism" appear in a section called "General Classroom Management Techniques," along with such topics as "Handling Student Lateness to Class" and "Keeping Inventory of Major Laboratory Equipment and General Supplies." For Fleming, organic evolution isn't the grand, unifying concept of modern biology. For Fleming, evolution isn't a scientific matter at all; it is just an administrative difficulty that the teacher must circumvent -- and if a student's parents don't want the student to hear about "any theory [sic] other than what is taught at home," the teacher should simply tell the student to perform "alternative assignments such as preparing a paper dealing with his or her own belief system."

(Any teacher who is worthy of the name will immediately reject Fleming's notion that the iteration of a "belief system" can be substituted for the learning of science. What if a student belongs to a quackish cult whose members reject vaccination and believe that infectious diseases are caused by Satanic vibrations? What if a student belongs to a sect which teaches that heredity is controlled by the "male force," with no contribution by the female? Without doubt, Fleming would say that such students should write papers about their "belief systems" instead of learning anything about immunology, microbiology or genetics; but any respectable teacher would regard that suggestion as a gross insult.)

I am glad that the NSTA has corrected its mistake and has stopped promoting Fleming's trash.

Cranking Away in Alabama

In some ways Darwin on Trial is just a conventional piece of "creation-science" -- replete with misrepresentation, misdirection, distortion and fiction -- but it has been composed with some rhetorical skill. Johnson enlists many quotations from other works, provides a pretentious addendum of "Research Notes," and does a generally superior job of trying to convert creationist claptrap into serious diseducation. Moreover, he shows considerable boldness: At one point he actually tries to float his own, self-serving definition of creationist, even though the meaning of that word is well established and well known. Darwin on Trial is rubbish delivered with flair, and I have come to regard it with special favor.

Apparently I am not alone in this. It seems that Fob James likes Johnson's book too. James, who is the governor of Alabama, has been leading a campaign to promote creationism in Alabama's public schools, and his efforts have included a public performance in which he imitated an ape for the edification of the State Board of Education. (See TTL, January-February, page 12.) Now he has come up with something almost as gross: According to a press release that his office issued on 19 March, James has used $2,967.30 of state funds to buy 900 copies of Darwin on Trial, and he has sent a copy to "every public school science teacher in the state."

The press release included a statement from James himself:

"If Alabama's students are going to understand how science really works, they must learn to evaluate and analyze theories," Gov. James said.

"It should be clearly understood that an attempt to improve science education by encouraging healthy and constructive criticism of evolutionary theory is not equivalent to teaching `creation science' or to bringing religion into the classroom," the governor added.

Evidently, though, the governor forgot to add that Johnson's book does not provide "criticism of evolutionary theory," because Johnson has not bothered to learn what evolutionary theory is or what evolutionary theory tells us. Indeed, Johnson repeatedly shows that he hasn't even bothered to learn basic biology. (Here, for example, is one of his notions about animals: "Amphibians lay their eggs in water and the larvae undergo a complex metamorphosis before reaching the adult stage." That is simple-minded stuff from the 5th grade. Anyone who has studied the amphibians knows that they are wonderfully diverse in their modes of reproduction, that many of them do not lay eggs in water, and that many of them do not have larval stages and do not undergo metamorphosis. Creationists may find comfort in clinging to 5th-grade typology, but biologists know that the multiform modes of reproduction and development shown by amphibians are unmistakable products of descent with modification.)

The governor also neglected to add that Johnson's book has been discredited, repeatedly and well, in reviews written by scientists. The reviews include "The Persistent Conflict," by Thomas H. Jukes, in Journal of Molecular Evolution for September 1991; and "Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge," by Stephen Jay Gould, in Scientific American for July 1992. I recommend both of these to science teachers, in Alabama and elsewhere, who may encounter Darwin on Trial. Both help to expose the follies and fantasies in Johnson's claims about nature, about history, and about science.

Pakistan's Little Slaves

Some of the evils that the Prentice Hall writers concealed are cogently described in Jonathan Silvers's report "Child Labor in Pakistan" in the February issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It is strong stuff -- an account of how millions of Pakistani children, many of them only six or seven years old, are used as slaves in brick factories, carpet mills, steel mills and other industrial operations. Silvers goes beyond the simple cataloguing of horrors, however, for he views child labor in a broad social context that includes Pakistan's ruinously high birth rate and an education system that can accommodate only one-third of Pakistan's school-aged children. His report will be valuable to teachers who give courses in geography or in cultural studies.

William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes frequently about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false "history" in schoolbooks.

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