The RightWingNuthouse has a lovely round-up of links relating to the dumbing down of science education in the name of multiculturalism and fundamentalism:
What is going on here? While the goals of the moonbats and idiotarians are different, the motivations behind the meddling in science curricula are similar; to bend science to fit a specific worldview. While it’s pretty easy to make fun of “monkey trials” and attempts to equate tribal shamans with medical doctors, the sad fact is that by fiddling with the way science is taught, our children are the ones who suffer the consequences.
RWN quotes liberally from the appalling Weekly Standard article, "A Textbook Case of Junk Science." There are misrepresentations, omissions, and disproportionate chunks of text...
Affirmative action for women and minorities is similarly pervasive in science textbooks, to absurd effect. Al Roker, the affable black NBC weatherman, is hailed as a great scientist in one book in the Discovery Works series. It is common to find Marie Curie given a picture and half a page of text, but her husband, Pierre, who shared a Nobel Prize with her, relegated to the role of supportive spouse. In the same series, Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, is shown next to black scientist Lewis Latimer, who improved the light bulb by adding a carbon filament. Edison's picture is smaller.Jews have been awarded 22 percent of all Nobel Prizes in science, but readers of Houghton Mifflin's fifth-grade textbooks won't get wind of that. Navajo physicist Fred Begay, however, merits half a page for his study of Navajo medicine. Albert Einstein isn't mentioned. Biologist Clifton Poodry has made no noteworthy scientific discoveries, but he was born on the Tonawanda Seneca Indian reservation, so his picture is shown in Glenco/McGraw-Hill's Life Science (2002), a middle-school biology textbook. The head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, and Nobel Laureates James Watson, Maurice H.F. Wilkins, and Francis Crick aren't named.
...and then there are downright ludicrous falsities:
Several centuries ago, some "very light-skinned" people were shipwrecked on a tropical island. After "many years under the tropical sun," this light-skinned population became "dark-skinned," says Biology: The Study of Life, a high-school textbook published in 1998 by Prentice Hall, an imprint of Pearson Education."Downright bizarre," says Nina Jablonski, who holds the Irvine chair of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences. Jablonski, an expert in the evolution of skin color, says it takes at least 15,000 years for skin color to evolve from black to white or vice versa. That sure is "many years." The suggestion that skin color can change in a few generations has no basis in science.
I'm not sure if I agree with RWN's Godwinizing of the argument, in which he suggests that, for example, purging the names of the three men who unlocked the secrets of DNA is remiscent of the Nazi drive to remove Jewish scientists from textbooks (and the world, for that matter). On the other hand, it's hard to understand what possibly could be the motive for leaving the names of those three men out of a biology textbook.
The WS article doesn't mention if the topic of DNA is avoided altogether, which seems impossible, or if the textbook merely jumps into the discussion of DNA without naming the men who made all the work in that area possible, which seems more likely. The textbook writers may have been determined to avoid spending too much time featuring "dead white males," but in the process they'll have helped create a cohort of culturally-illiterate students who will give blank stares when the name Francis Crick is mentioned.
Posted by kswygert at May 9, 2005 02:02 PM