So today everyone knows what the major schoolbook companies have
known all along. The companies have long recognized that the
teacher corps in America includes some desperate dumbbells, and the
companies have learned to produce books that the dumbbells will
like.
Biology: An Everyday Experience is a textbook aimed squarely
at the dumbbell market -- a textbook for teachers who don't have a
clue. And it apparently has been a commercial success, for Glencoe
has found no reason to alter it during the past seven years.
When I reviewed the 1992 incarnation of An Everyday
Experience I compared it to the worthless biology books that had
been common during the 1970s. Bereft of any theme and any rational
organization, An Everyday Experience was a giddy mess of
nature stuff (including lots of fake "facts") leavened with
religious myths, health tips, old wives' tales and anthropocentric
fantasies, and it made no sense at all. In one particularly
memorable section, Glencoe's writers falsely equated "scientific
method" with experimentation, then presented a fake "experiment"
that obviously could not work
[see note 1, below].
What I found most noteworthy, though, was an item near the very
front of the book. It was a list of thirteen educators who had
served as "reviewers" of An Everyday Experience and who
apparently had judged, on behalf of their fellow dumbbells, that it
was fine and dandy. Even the fact that Glencoe's so-called
experiment was ignorant humbug had apparently eluded all of them. I
considered their collective performance to be so impressive that I
concluded my analysis by quoting the names and the affiliations of
all thirteen reviewers, as listed in the book.
The only other differences that I have noticed are tiny. When I
randomly chose 69 pages in the 1999 book and compared them with the
like-numbered pages in the 1992 book, I observed six cases in which
the wording of a paragraph or a picture-caption has undergone
trivial alteration.
The 1999 version, then, is virtually the same as the 1992. It
offers the same giddy mess of nature stuff (including lots of fake
"facts") leavened with religious myths, health tips, old wives'
tales and anthropocentric fantasies, and it makes no sense at all.
The fake "experiment" is still here, as dumb as ever. Alex Haley is
still here, too: Glencoe's hacks are still glorifying him and his
bogus book (in a shamefully dishonest article on page 66), and they
are still equating his shenanigans with science! Likewise, they are
still dispensing scores of ridiculous, unexplained one-liners: They
say, for example, that blackboard chalk "comes from tiny living
things found in the ocean" and that "The flavors of coffee and cocoa
are due to bacteria." (If you were a young student who knew nothing
about any commercial fermentation processes, and nothing about the
materials that are used in producing the coffee and the cocoa that
you see on supermarket shelves, what would you make of the
statement that "The flavors of coffee and cocoa are due to
bacteria"?) Of course, the writers are still promoting their
nonsensical categorization of the animal kingdom into "simple"
animals and "complex" animals [note 2],
and they continue to
relegate organic evolution to a single, late chapter, so students
will not learn how or why evolution functions as the grand, unifying
principle of modern biology. They also continue to promote, in
chapter 15, a disgraceful "Lab" activity in which the teacher must
deceive students. This activity -- titled "Is glucose found in the
urine of a person with diabetes?" -- requires the teacher to tell
lies about the "investigation" that the students are performing and
about the materials that they are using.
All the notes are identical: "For more information about the
material in this chapter, follow the link for the chapter on the
Glencoe Homepage at http://www.glencoe.com".
All the notes are erroneous: I learned this just as soon as I went
to "the Glencoe Homepage" to see what lay in store for students who
might want "more information."
The page at http://www.glencoe.com was not a page for students, and
it did not say anything about An Everyday Experience. It was
a promotional display, aimed at Glencoe's customers or prospective
customers, and it offered links to several categories of McGraw-Hill
products, such as "SECONDARY EDUCATION," "POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION"
and "MCGRAW-HILL LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES." It also offered links to
"Customer Service," "Technical Support" and "Sales Representatives,"
among other things. I didn't know what a student would do when
confronted with that irrelevant array, but I decided to poke around
and to follow some of the promotional links. When I tried the link
for "SECONDARY EDUCATION," which presumably included high-school
biology, I obtained a page aimed at teachers. It showed a list of
twenty subjects, from "Mathematics" and "Science" through "Driver
Education," and it offered the teachers a "Tip Of the Day" --
"Communicate with parents about both positive and negative
aspects of their child's academic performance. . . ."
After noting the Tip, I worked my way downward through two more
levels of links that were aimed at teachers.
A student, I reckoned, would already have abandoned the search for
"more information" about material in An Everyday Experience
and would have fled from Glencoe's Web site. But I was fascinated
by the site's opacity and incompetence, so I continued to poke
around -- and I got lucky. I found a page showing pictures of four
books that Glencoe alleges to be biology books.
I clicked on the picture of An Everyday Experience. This led
me to a menu that offered "Web Links" and a "Teacher Forum" link. I
moved my cursor onto "Web Links," and -- lo! -- I obtained a
subsidiary menu that promised links for each chapter in the book!
I had arrived.
When I clicked on "Chapter 1," I got a list of four links. The
first was a link to the Yahoo search engine, which (Glencoe said)
could be used "to find any topic in biology." How helpful!
The second item on the list was a link to the Educational Resources
Information Center's "AskERIC" page. This was a page for teachers,
not students, and it offered some subsidiary links. There was, for
example, a link that would allow teachers to see more than 1,100
lesson plans, and there was a link to a question-and-answer service
-- "Ask a question about educational theory or practice and receive
a personalized e-mail response in two business days." I couldn't
infer why any student, seeking more information about the material
in chapter 1 of An Everyday Experience, would want to ask
questions about educational theory or practice.
The third item on the list was a link to a site that allegedly had
"a detailed history of the light microscope." I clicked, and I got
a message that said "Not Found." Apparently, there was no such
site.
The last item on the list was a link that took me to "Dennis
Kunkel's Microscopy," a series of pages that told about microscopy
and presented many photomicrographs.
By then I had expended a considerable amount of time in rummaging
through the Glencoe Web pages, but I wasn't yet ready to leave. I
already had learned that the "interNET CONNECTION" notes in An
Everyday Experience were useless to the student, and I had
inferred that the only clear purpose of those "interNET CONNECTION"
notes was to con dumb teachers, and I had seen that the Glencoe Web
pages were elaborate junk, but I had to make one more stop.
Recalling the deplorable "Lab" activity in chapter 15 of An
Everyday Experience (the activity that allegedly dealt with
diabetes, and that required the teacher to tell lies), I wanted to
inspect Glencoe's links for that chapter.
There were two. The first, titled "The Endocrine System," promised
me a site which would display "art and descriptions of the organs
involved in the endocrine system." When I clicked on this link, I
got a report which shouted "Forbidden" and which told me that I did
not have permission to visit the site in question.
The second link -- labeled "Diabetes, Mediconsult.com" -- would
furnish "information on diabetes," Glencoe said. When I clicked on
it, I got a "Not Found" report.
And that was the end of my visit to the Glencoe Web pages.
Notes
William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the
California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook
League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes
often about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false
"history" in schoolbooks.
Reviewing a high-school book in biology
Biology: An Everyday Experience
1999. 744 pages. ISBN of the student's edition: 0-02-825685-9.
Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 936 Eastwind Drive, Westerville, Ohio 43081.
(Glencoe/McGraw-Hill is a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies.)
Thirteen Dumbbells and an "interNET" Too!
William J. Bennetta
It recently has become permissible to acknowledge that our
public-education establishment is infested with impostors and incompetents
-- ignorant teachers who never have studied the subjects that they
allegedly are teaching, education administrators who themselves have
had little education, and ed-school professors who are just feckless
cranks. Accounts of widespread incompetence among classroom
teachers, in particular, are appearing not only in the popular press
but also in professional publications.
The 1999 Version
Glencoe's Web Pages
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