Student Sees Problems With H.S. Text

AP via SFGate ^ | 4/8/8 | NANCY ZUCKERBROD, AP Education Writer

[SmithL]

Talk about a civics lesson: A high-school senior has raised questions about political bias in a popular textbook on U.S. government, and legal scholars and top scientists say the teen's criticism is well-founded.

They say "American Government" by conservatives James Wilson and John Dilulio presents a skewed view of topics from global warming to separation of church and state. The publisher now says it will review the book, as will the College Board, which oversees college-level Advanced Placement courses used in high schools.

Student Matthew LaClair of Kearny, N.J., recently brought his concerns to the attention of the Center for Inquiry, an Amherst, N.Y., think tank that promotes science and which has issued a scathing report about the textbook.

"I just realized from my own knowledge that some of this stuff in the book is just plain wrong," said LaClair, who is using the book as part of an AP government class at Kearny High School.

The textbook is designed for a college audience, but also is widely used in AP American government courses, said Richard Blake, a spokesman for the publisher, Houghton Mifflin

...Hansen has sent Houghton Mifflin a letter stating that the book's discussion on global warming contained "a large number of clearly erroneous statements" that give students "the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain."

The edition of the textbook published in 2005, which is in high school classrooms now, states that "science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all."

A newer edition published late last year was changed to say, "Science doesn't know how bad the greenhouse effect is."

The authors kept a phrase stating that global warming is "enmeshed in scientific uncertainty."

[weegee]

Question authority including the authority of the socialist who demands that you tear down the old authority’s established order.

[rmlew]

To be fair I caught textbook errors as far back as 7th grade. I actually wrote in about a painting claiming to show American battleships at the Battle of Midway. I noted that the ships were clearly cruisers and documented that fact that our heaviest surface action forces were carriers and cruisers. I never got a response.

And don't get me started on my textbooks for AP US and European history.

[rmlew]

Meanwhile, factually accurate books by Howard Zinn sit in a dark corner, gathering dust.
A Peoples History contains dozens of errors, aside from it being communist agitprop.