Intended for June 2, 2001

MANY SCIENCE TEXTBOOKS MISEDUCATE CHILDREN

Politicians aren't the only people who have their names on books they didn't write.

The same is often true of textbook authors, John Hubisz discovered in the course of a study of the egregious scientific errors found in widely adopted middle-school physics books.

"The notion of 'author' in these texts is quite foreign to us," writes Hubisz, a professor of physics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Of the people identified as such, "none that we contacted would claim to be an 'author,' and some did not even know that their names had been so listed."

The lengthy lists of authors, editors and consultants are attributable to the publishers' desire to present their books as authoritative and up-to-the-minute for the benefit of state and local officials who adopt textbooks and who are bedazzled by beautiful pictures and fantastic layouts.

"Committees produce mush," Hubisz says, "and it is very difficult to find anyone with the authority to make corrections."

What kind of errors? When the study came out in January, news stories picked on easy targets such as the picture of Linda Ronstadt that appeared in a 1997 Prentice-Hall textbook identified as a silicon crystal doped with an arsenic impurity.

I have no idea what a silicon crystal doped with an arsenic impurity actually looks like -- and I wonder whether a middle-student would understand what he was looking at if the picture were correct -- but such a gaffe, no matter how embarrassing to the publisher, is not damaging to the students, who will not be inclined to make this misinformation part of their permanent understanding of physics.

But when they're misinformed about a subject they don't know much about -- physics, that is -- they are likely to stay misinformed for the rest of their lives. Even if they take more physics courses, and most of them never will, their early misconceptions will persist.

Here are a few (from a hundred pages' worth) that persisted right into print.

How do airplanes fly? "The discussion of Bernoulli's principle states that the air moves faster over the top of the wing in order to arrive at the back end at the same time as the air that went under the wing."

I remember learning that.

How do elephants communicate? One book says "human ears cannot detect" the sounds they make, which are "very low in pitch -- about 400 Hz."

That's about the middle of a piano keyboard, one and a half semi-tones lower than the oboe's 440-A sounded for an orchestra to tune.

And speaking of pianos, one book shows a picture of an upright piano turned 90 degrees. It can't play in that position, because the action depends on gravity.

Speaking of pictures, many books have them flipped right-to-left (including, repeatedly, one of the Statue of Liberty, who thus appears to be holding her torch in the wrong hand).

Other images that purport to be photographs are not, including one of a bunch of sheep that turns out to be one sheep, repeated eight times. Pictorial cloning.

Problems with illustrations are common, Hubisz found, and even when the text is corrected the illustrations may not be. He found one illustration showing the equator running roughly through Tucson, Texas and Tallahassee.

Another illustration shows the electromagnetic spectrum with the order of the colors reversed, so that infrared is next to violet and red is next to ultraviolet. Wouldn't an observant child wonder why they were named the way they were?

Another text tells children that prisms are shaped like triangles, and also that raindrops are prisms.

Okay, so those (and thousands more in a dozen different books) are innocent mistakes. Distortions for political reasons are not innocent, though understandable because offending some organized group will get a book killed much faster than merely incorrent scientific information.

One book tells its impressionable readers that "many scientists won't live near an overhead power line or sleep under an electric blanket."

Yeah, and they won't walk under ladders either.

The environmental hazards of nuclear power are played up, while the hazards of other technologies are all but ignored. Another article about the possible cancer deaths due to a nuclear accident fails to point out that the largest dose "was half what folks in Colorado get naturally."

And we haven't even started on the effort to substitute emotion for knowledge. In one book with an incorrect diagram of a lunar eclipse, students are asked whether they have experienced an eclipse and told to write stories about their feelings.

They surely won't be able to write intelligently about the facts. "Students come through school with a strong dose of mystical thinking," Hubisz concludes.

This study originated, in part, when one parent tried to get an explanation for the errors in his daughter's science book, and got a runaround instead. Check out the books your children are using.

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