The Textbook Trap » Examples of errors in secular textbooks
Lawrence Davis, a biochemistry professor at Kansas State University and a reviewer of textbooks for The Textbook League, explains that the errors often result directly from how secular textbooks are compiled. He says, regarding high school science textbooks, “There are errors that are real conceptual errors. And some authors tend not to explore everything from scratch and they go to other books and use those same examples that are wrong. Once mistakes get in textbooks they’re very hard to get out.”1
William Beaty, author of a website that tries to correct scientific misinformation, cites many examples of errors in science textbooks. He compares the transmission of errors from textbook to textbook to the spread of a virus: “As in any disease epidemic, a particular piece of information can spread exponentially: the more textbooks it occupies, the more likely other textbooks will be to acquire it . . . .The bad information can be spread almost as easily as the good.”2
Is it any wonder then that Philip Sadler, a researcher from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, found that students in high school science classes often score “worse at the end of the year on their understanding of basic science concepts than they had before the class began”?3
Maybe the textbooks themselves are the problem.
1 Andrew J. Pulskamp, “Big Blunders Found in School Textbooks,” U Magazine.
2 William Beaty, “A ‘Germ Theory’ of Education” Science Hobbyist (1997).
3 Chandler, David L. “Textbooks Flunk Out,” Boston Globe (May 17, 1999)