Science Insights: Exploring Matter and Energy
What Addison-Wesley's writers are endorsing here (though they
have misspelled its name) is geomancy -- a kind of ancient
Oriental magic that is still practiced today, often as a swindle.
Geomancers say that our planet is pervaded by mystical
emanations that affect human fortunes, and they claim to know how
these emanations can be used for securing good luck and for
divining the future. Their enterprise is pure bunkum,
completely unsupported by evidence, and the rituals by which they
purport to align buildings, rooms and furniture with "forces of
the earth" are nonsensical. If geomancy is a "technique" (as
Addison-Wesley's writers call it), it is a technique for gulling
the ignorant.
Addison-Wesley has been attempting to dignify geomancy for
several years now, and the same sentence that I've quoted above
(including the wrong spelling of geomancy) appeared in both the
1994 and the 1996 versions of Exploring Matter and Energy. I am
not surprised to see it again in the 1997 "Texas edition" because
this book is virtually identical to the 1996, even though
Addison-Wesley has printed "NEW EDITION" and "TEXAS EDITION" on
the 1997 book's cover.
When I randomly chose 67 pages in the student's edition of the
"Texas edition" and compared them with the like-numbered pages in
the 1996 book, I found no substantive difference whatsoever in
content, in wording, or even in punctuation. The only difference
that I've detected is trivial: In the "Chapter Vocabulary"
exercises in the "Texas edition," each vocabulary word is
accompanied by a page number to show where a definition of the
word can be found; the 1996 book gave section numbers, not page
numbers.
All the howlers are still in place, including the twins who were
0 cm long at birth, the iceberg that violates Newton's first law,
the bogus "explanation" of a diesel engine, the botched diagrams
of electrical devices, and even the dumb notion that ECNALUBMA
is the mirror image of AMBULANCE. And yes, Addison-Wesley is
still telling students that the ancient Greeks and Arabs,
apparently endowed with a precognitive awareness of medieval
English, referred to magnetic rocks as "lodestones."
[See "Unilingual Education" in The
Textbook Letter, May-June 1996, page 11.]
Though the "Texas edition" is obviously trash, it has in fact
been adopted by Texas's Board of Education for use as a 9th-grade
science book -- and from this I infer that Texas's procedures
for evaluating and adopting schoolbooks still revolve around sham
and theatrics. I investigated a Texas adoption five years ago,
when the state was dealing with American-history books, and I
concluded that it was a bureaucratic sham from start to finish.
For one thing, the committee that allegedly "evaluated" history
books for the Board of Education didn't include anyone who had
credentials as a historian. For another, the Board ran the
adoption in a way which ensured that all of the candidate books,
no matter how bad they were, would be accepted. [See "Deep in
the Heart of Folly" in TTL, May-June 1992.]
I infer that these or equivalent practices still prevail. I
cannot conceive of any other way to explain Texas's adoption of
Exploring Matter and Energy.
To read about other cases in which Addison-Wesley has promoted
superstition in "science" books, see "Addison-Wesley Extends the
Quack Attack" in TTL for May-June 1995, and "Addison-Wesley
Attacks Again" in TTL for November-December 1995.
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.
Reviewing a middle-school book in physical science
Texas edition, 1997. 672 pages. ISBN of the student's edition: 0-201-67326-6.
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 2725 Sand Hill Road,
Menlo Park, California 94025.
Addison-Wesley Tries Again to Dignify Oriental Magic
William J. Bennetta
Addison-Wesley is still at it -- still producing "science" texts
larded with false and misleading claims that promote magic and
conflate science with superstition. Here is a nugget from the
new "Texas edition" of Science Insights: Exploring Matter and
Energy, dated in 1997:
Chinese builders first used compasses for geomacy [sic], a
technique used to align houses and cities harmoniously with the
forces of the earth.
Invisible Infants and Imaginary Arabs
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