Reasons to Avoid Government Schools - Part 2

Continuing on from Reasons to Avoid Government Schools - Part 1

Textbooks are badly written (and too expensive). Just as there are almost numberless examples of waste in public education, there are almost endless examples of problems with school textbooks.

Middle-School Texts Don't Make the Grade reported on an extensive review of current science textbooks. This report stated that "...none of the 12 most popular middle-school physical science texts was acceptable."

Here a a few examples found in science textbooks:

* Mass and weight were often confused.

* Isaac Newton's first law was often incorrectly stated

* Examples illustrating Isaac Newton's third law were wrong

* Word such as "speed," "velocity," and "acceleration" were often confused

* The depictions of light passing through a prism were often incorrect.

* Electrical circuits were frequently drawn improperly

* The scientific approach was not described in any of the popular books reviewed

* Political correctness is often more important than scientific accuracy: Middle-school text publishers now employ more people to censor books for content that might offend any organized lobbying group than they do to check facts


I know someone with a strong science background that worked as a substitute at a local high school. One day, he was asked to work in a class that was taking a multiple choice science test. Since he had nothing else to do during the testing time, he took the test himself. The substitute quickly found that three questions did not have a possible correct answer. He wrote the question numbers on the board and told the class to skip those questions.

The next day he was called into the principals office. He was in trouble. The principal explained that this test had been used by the science department for three years. They knew that the questions were not entirely accurate, but they felt their students were not sophisticated enough to understand certain concepts, like "the difference between buoyancy and density." He was flabbergasted.

The next day he was substituting in the same class. He began the class with a short explanation of the difference between buoyancy and density. The class had the concept down in only a few minutes.


Here are another tidbit from the report:

The general reading level has deteriorated markedly over the last 20-40 years. The publishers, as noted later, have responded to this by dropping the level of science texts. Cornell professor Donald Hayes on results of sampling 788 textbooks used between 1860 and 1992 said, "Honors high school texts are no more difficult than an eighth grade reader was before World War II."

Note: The report, entitled Review of Middle School Physical Science Texts, was funded by a grant from The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.


Hillsdale College published an article called K-12 Establishment is Putting America’s Industrial Leadership at Risk in the February 2005 edition of Imprimis.

"In 2003, the American Association for the Advancement of Science rated less than ten percent of middle school math books to be acceptable, and no science books."


Now moving along to history text books. The following are excerpts from U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on Intellectual Diversity. September 24, 2003. Testimony of Gilbert T. Sewall, American Textbook Council, New York, NY

The first history textbook problem is what educators, critics and journalists informally refer to as "dumbing down." Many history textbooks reflect lowered sights for general education.

They (publishers) make books whose content is meant to suit the sensitivities of groups and causes more interested in self-promotion than in historical fact, scholarly appraisal, or balance.

At worst, biased instructional materials are undermining students' appreciation for America and citizenship.



The Textbook Letter, May-June 1995 has a good examples of text book absurdity in a middle school history book called Peoples and Places in World History.

While the chapter deals with ancient Egypt, the writers have injected a "Think It Over" question that pertains to a current controversy over the protection of desert tortoises in the southwestern United States: "Ravens often make desert tortoises their meal. Some people suggest killing the ravens. Do you think this is right? Why should a tortoise have a better claim to life than a raven?"

Like children are going to learn about ancient Egypt by discussing killing birds in the southwestern United States. It is a blatant attempt to manipulation the opinions of children on political matters.


A very good book on the problems of bias in textbooks is The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch.

Here are a few excerpts:

The literature textbooks for middle school and high school from the major publishers are compilations of odds and ends. The books are litteredwith non-literary features, such as an essay on homelessness or air pollution. One [book] teaches students how to read a weather map, a time line,and a telephone book.

One book published by Prentice-Hall . . . has an excerpt from a script of a once popular television program, Xena: Warrior Princess. This script would not qualify as ‘literature’ by any standard other than the one in which absolutely everything in print is ‘literature.’

In a significant variation on the cultural equivalence theme, Houghton Mifflin’s world history text for middle students implies that every worldculture is wonderful except for the United States. . . . Compared to other cultures of the world, the United States sounds like a frightening place. Why people keep trying to immigrate to this unwelcoming, mean-spirited culture is a puzzle.

In an appendix, The Language Police provides a list, almost 30 pages long, of banned words, usages, stereotypes, and topics. For example:

- Bubbler (banned as regional bias, replace with water fountain).

- Pollyanna ( banned as sexist, replace with optimist).

- Balance names like Mary, John, and Jane with names such as Jose, Lashunda, Che, Ling.

- Avoid butter or pies in texts [i.e., promote a healthy diet in conformity with someone’s diet pyramid].

- Avoid dinosaurs (implies evolution).


Textbooks in science and mathematics grew fatter as publishers added biographies of mathematicians and scientists who were women, AfricanAmericans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and people with disabilities. Students became used to seeing sidebars about social issues intheir textbooks, even when they were irrelevant to the lessons.

My sister, who at the time had 4 children, discovered problems with her daughter's math textbook. It promoted zero population growth. The message my niece got was that the world would have been a much better place if only her youngest brother and sister had never been born. My sister later told me that she never dreamed she would need to screen her daughter's math book.



Last year a bill went through the California Assembly, AB 756, to "Prohibits the State Board of Education (SBE) and the governing board of any local education agency (LEA) from adopting any instructional material that exceeds 200 pages in length."


It looks like politicians are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

One of the wonderful things about homeschooling is that we are not tied to textbooks. We normally use "real" books. Regardless, we use lots of books with more than 200 pages. There is a wealth of wonderful materials available to homeschoolers with a rich vocabulary and substantial content.


See Reasons to Avoid Government Schools - Part 3 and Part 4


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