Earth Daydreams, Textbook Fantasies

To get an idea of just how factually inaccurate classroom lectures can be, just take a look at the books that accompany them. Textbook reviewers in California and Texas, the largest markets for this product, did just that and found widely-used texts desperately in need of fact-checkers.

“No college or state textbook authority currently requires a warranty on accuracy, nor does any publisher offer one,” Carl Olson of the Textbook Trust points out. “At least one school district has been upset enough with the poor accuracy of textbooks to call for such a warranty.”

The Textbook Trust is based in Woodland Hills, California. The school district Olson refers to is the Simi Valley Unified, which was required to use the Houghton-Mifflin offering Oh, California!, a purported state history. The book, as Olson shows, contains some real gems:

• “Columbus started off from Portugal.”[No, he sailed from Spain.]
• “The Pony Express started at Fort Kearney, Nebraska.” [The real starting point—
  St. Joseph, Missouri.”

• “Malibu and Santa Monica are somehow in the San Fernando Valley.” [This would make surfing difficult.]
• “The transcontinental railroad went south of Lake Tahoe.” [Actually, it went north of it.”

Not to be outdone, Holt, Rinehart & Winston (HRW) managed to cram enough inaccuracies in science and history textbooks to give critics in two states writing cramps correcting the publishing house’s errors. Start with the California edition of Earth Science, a high school textbook.

“Over 40 teachers along with their schools’ names appeared in the Holt, Rinehart & Winston textbook,” Olson notes. “However, they all missed the date of discovery of the Rosetta Stone by a century, they thought that gold dissolves in hot water, they believed there was a dinosaur walking around ancient New Mexico weighing 200 thousand pounds, and they stated that magnetic compasses point to geographic north.”

HRW’s accuracy has not improved much over time either. Veteran educator Anne C. Westwater reviewed HRW’s reissue of Modern Earth Science, then a nine-year-old textbook, in 1998 for the Sausalito, California-based Textbook League. Retired in 1997, Westwater taught biology, earth science and environmental science at Napa High School in California for 15 years.

“Guess what!,” Westwater wrote. “Most of the factual and conceptual errors that Boucot and Smith [two earlier reviewers] saw in the 1989 version are still in place, nine years later.”

“They include wrong descriptions of the geologic nature of plains, the formation of coal, and the formation of placer deposits; an erroneous attempt to classify landforms; and even a startlingly wrong notion (which Boucot described as ‘laughable’) about the location of Pangaea. In a number of places, Holt has reprinted erroneous material word-for-word.”

HRW’s reputation for factual fidelity does not improve when the publishing giant crosses state lines. The publisher responded to at least seven misleading or factually inaccurate passages that the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPFF) found in HRW’s sixth-grade textbook, People, Places and Change: An Introduction to World Studies.

“Famine in Ethiopia is caused not just by drought,” the TPPF reviewer wrote. “Major factors are civil war and bad government, especially during the communist regime of the 1970s-1980s.”

“While we do not believe that this passage contains a factual error,” the HRW representative responded, “we do agree with the reviewer that clarification of the reason for the starvation of millions of people in Ethiopia would be helpful.”

“We will change the last two sentences of the first paragraph to read: ‘Drought, combined with war and ineffective government policies, caused the starvation of several million people in the 1980s.”

Even this revised recap of Cold War history offers a startling bowdlerization of the abuses of the Marxist Mengistu government as chronicled by virtually every international human rights group, including Amnesty International. Going back in time, HRW’s record of communist atrocities fades to an even paler shade of gray.

“The Communist Worker’s Republic in Spain aggressively persecuted Catholics and murdered priests,” the TPPF reviewer notes of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. “So the rather anodyne phrase adopted by the authors, suggesting that the communists just wanted to ‘reduce Church influence,’ does not convey adequately the communist animus toward Catholicism in Spain.”

HRW’s response: “While the reviewer may feel that the statement is not strong enough, we believe it accurately portrays the events and is appropriate wording for our sixth-grade audience within the scope of this course.”

Maybe the textbook reviewers from whom we gathered the above critiques should actually be writing the texts that students read.