Do you know what are in your kids textbooks ?

[Modelworks]

Fox or Faux is doing a story on this friday at 9pm EST if any want to DVR it.
I'm curious as to what they will find. I think many know that textbooks have been going downhill for several years. Facts are not checked, things are omitted and sometimes outright lies are being taught. It is no wonder kids have poor test scores, they are only repeating what they are being taught.


Some that I was able to find:

Gravity in space is zero
There are seven colors in the rainbow
Sound travels better through solids and liquids
Lakes and oceans are blue because they reflect the blue sky
Electricity is a form of energy
Electricity is made of electrons
Static electricity is caused by friction
Ben Franklin's kite was struck by lightning
Light always travels at 186,000 miles per second
The stuff that flows through wires is called 'electric current'

109,263 errors found in math books being considered for elementary school children and teachers, that is one single edition. Despite the errors, state board members tentatively approved most of the books for use in public schools beginning next fall -- subject to correction of the errors. The total projected cost for the elementary school math books is $116.8 million.

textbook explains the twinkling of stars thus -- for the observer on earth, the light appears to come from a point, say B, although it originated from another point, say A. Because of the variation in density, the extent of bending (light) changes continuously. So the observer on Earth sees the star at B at one instant, C at another and so on. This causes the star to twinkle.

Illustration depicting the equator running through central Texas

A special section by the National Geographic Society shows a modern recreation of a Galileo experiment in which objects of different weights are dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But Galileo never performed such an experiment,

Wrong words as the beginning of the Declaration of Independence

Credits Galileo, rather than Newton and Descartes, with discovering the correct law of inertia.

Incorrect formula for the volume of a sphere

The Vietnam war was between north and south Korea.

Fox will probably just focus on political stuff.
Curious what others here know about.

 

[StageLeft]

The Vietnam war was between north and south Korea.

It was. I was there.

 

[rudder]

It burns me up when my daughter says... "but dad this is what my teacher told me" when it is something blatantly wrong.

 

[fskimospy]

Uhmm, a lot of those 'wrong facts' aren't wrong. Sound does travel most quickly through solids and liquids (depends on how you want to define 'best' I guess), electricity is most certainly a form of energy, electric current is quite frequently created by electrons, and depending on the year of the child learning it I'd be very comfortable telling him only that. (I don't see why we need to bring charged ions in limited mediums into it), and I'm not aware of much else that flows through wires besides electric current, etc.. etc.

 

[Fenixgoon]

correct me if im wrong but....

1. are there not 7 colors of the rainbow - roy-g-biv?

2. electricity is the flow of electrons (or more properly, holes and electrons. it's just that electrons are typically the dominant charge carrier). so in some sense, it is "made" of electrons. certainly not the best way to describe it though.

3. since electricity can be used to do work, it must be a form of energy (just like heat)

4. sound does travel better through solids and liquids - just compare the velocity of sound in different materials. air - 343 m/s @ 20C; steel - 5930m/s longitudinally; water - ~1500m/s (courtesy of wikipedia). now if you mean in terms of signal strength (dB), then i dunno what to tell you there

5. IIRC, friction causes the stripping of electrons, which in turn builds charge and causes static electricity.

6. light always travels ~3x10^8 (m/s)*

*in vacuum

my guess is that some of these mistakes are just simplifications. for gradeschoolers, there's no need to go into a deep discussion about holes and electrons, charge carrier mobilities, drift velocity, mean free path, wave functions of potentials, etc.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: eskimospy
Uhmm, a lot of those 'wrong facts' aren't wrong. Sound does travel most quickly through solids and liquids (depends on how you want to define 'best' I guess), electricity is most certainly a form of energy, electric current is quite frequently created by electrons, and depending on the year of the child learning it I'd be very comfortable telling him only that. (I don't see why we need to bring charged ions in limited mediums into it), and I'm not aware of much else that flows through wires besides electric current, etc.. etc.

Sound travels in waves. Waves require space between solids or they wouldn't propagate .

Electricity is a flow of energy not a form of energy.

Electric current does not flow through wire, electricity does.

These are important distinctions.


The problem is these are not grade school books, but high school + books.

 

[Unmoosical]

Damn it, get these facts outta the childrens textbooks!

I understand the point of the article but get some better examples.

 

[Moonbeam]

My parents told me to get an education and boy oh boy were they pissed when they saw what that did.

 

[waggy]

yeah. i swear its a scam by the book makers. they sale the school board with "errors" then next semester/year they have to buy n ew books. wich have errors and have to be replaced. etc..

 

[DesiPower]

Internet is a bunch of tubes

Text books in Alaska are the best

 

[DesiPower]

Originally posted by: waggy
yeah. i swear its a scam by the book makers. they sale the school board with "errors" then next semester/year they have to buy n ew books. wich have errors and have to be replaced. etc..

The problems is that the brain dead teachers take the books literally, so each year the kids get little bit more brain dead

 

[RyanPaulShaffer]

Originally posted by: DesiPower
Internet is a bunch of tubes

And data is dump trucks, and when there are too many dump trucks, the tubes get clogged!

 

[Siddhartha]

How many different school text books are being used in the US? What is the real percentage of mistakes found in all the text books?

 

[waggy]

Originally posted by: DesiPower

Originally posted by: waggy
yeah. i swear its a scam by the book makers. they sale the school board with "errors" then next semester/year they have to buy n ew books. wich have errors and have to be replaced. etc..

The problems is that the brain dead teachers take the books literally, so each year the kids get little bit more brain dead

hate to tell you but the teachers have little choice. its really not up to them and if they do not fallow what they are told to teach they can get fired.


but yeah some do not correct a mistake if they see it in a book.

 

[waggy]

Originally posted by: RyanPaulShaffer

Originally posted by: DesiPower
Internet is a bunch of tubes

And data is dump trucks, and when there are too many dump trucks, the tubes get clogged!

i hate it when my tubes get clogged. i gotta take a laxitive to unclear them..

 

[xj0hnx]

When I took Texas History back in the early 80's in Jr High school, we learned that at the Alamo all occupants were killed, recently I noticed the story has change to a more politically correct version were the Mexican Army only killed the men, and let all the women and children go.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: Siddhartha
How many different school text books are being used in the US? What is the real percentage of mistakes found in all the text books?

That is the thing I have a hard time understanding.
Why do we have to re-write a history book every year ? Sometimes facts change as we find out new things, but what happened in a year usually doesn't change much

Why can't we get , for example, one history book, then add to it each year, vs re-writing the whole thing every year ?

Math doesn't change year to year, yet we need new books written each year on geometry , Euclid must be proud.

 

[Brainonska511]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
Math doesn't change year to year, yet we need new books written each year on geometry , Euclid must be proud.

This one particularly pisses me off - I got shafted in my first year of college - bought a 9th edition calc book; the following year, they moved on to the 10th edition. Please explain to me what has changed in calculus that you required a new edition?

I can see changing books every few years though, just because of changing teaching methods or just because better books are available. It should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, with teachers being the ones that discuss getting new books for a specific class and not some brain-dead administrator that was getting a free trip because they ordered 1000 books from McGraw-Hill.

As far as the above facts - what grade level are these tidbits of information being taught at? You obviously can't teach physics and calculus to a grade-school kid. You need to build a basic foundation about generic principles. You can then build on that and refine it with more detail as the years go by and their abilities to think abstractly increase.

 

[PottedMeat]

Originally posted by: Modelworks

Originally posted by: Siddhartha
How many different school text books are being used in the US? What is the real percentage of mistakes found in all the text books?

That is the thing I have a hard time understanding.
Why do we have to re-write a history book every year ? Sometimes facts change as we find out new things, but what happened in a year usually doesn't change much

Why can't we get , for example, one history book, then add to it each year, vs re-writing the whole thing every year ?

Math doesn't change year to year, yet we need new books written each year on geometry , Euclid must be proud.

...like a wikipedia for math?

A lot of the times you may have to buy a new text in college because the problems are changed/added/removed - the text itself is the same. They really should separate the problems & text, or the prof should make up their own. My intro to microcontrollers prof wrote his own book and the errata packet that came with it was ~25 pages double sided with a really small font.

 

[waggy]

Originally posted by: xj0hnx
When I took Texas History back in the early 80's in Jr High school, we learned that at the Alamo all occupants were killed, recently I noticed the story has change to a more politically correct version were the Mexican Army only killed the men, and let all the women and children go.

yeap seen that.

Also the reasons for the Civil war have changed. I learned that it was about states rights. Now its because of slavery.

Same with Lincoln and slavery. now he is a champion of equal rights for slaves. before he did it just to annoy the south more.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Originally posted by: waggy

Originally posted by: xj0hnx
When I took Texas History back in the early 80's in Jr High school, we learned that at the Alamo all occupants were killed, recently I noticed the story has change to a more politically correct version were the Mexican Army only killed the men, and let all the women and children go.

yeap seen that.

Also the reasons for the Civil war have changed. I learned that it was about states rights. Now its because of slavery.

Same with Lincoln and slavery. now he is a champion of equal rights for slaves. before he did it just to annoy the south more.

History is written by the winners right? I still hear and read about the states rights stuff. Shrug. Most textbooks do try to point that out a bit. But most importantly your school has to decide to read additional books. We had 2 books on top of our standard APUSH textbook so we could get a second take on things.

 

[CrackRabbit]

Originally posted by: xj0hnx
When I took Texas History back in the early 80's in Jr High school, we learned that at the Alamo all occupants were killed, recently I noticed the story has change to a more politically correct version were the Mexican Army only killed the men, and let all the women and children go.

Actually it was a woman (Susanna Dickinson) and a slave.
IIRC Santa Ana sent them from the Alamo to Sam Houston with a message saying something along the lines of; "This will be the fates of all of your men."

That's how we learned it in the mid 90s when I was in Texas History class.

Looking at the wikipedia article even what I was taught wasn't entirely correct, but fairly close to accurate, (it's also been a good 20 years since I was in the class as well.)

 

[sportage]

Look... :roll:

First... I would NOT trust FOX :roll: to tell you what is or is not in some text book.
Big mistake!!!

Second... I'm hearing the rattle of "book burnings" with this.

If anything, Fox is trying to stirr up the book burners, as they have all the other nut freaks in the country, lately.

My advice would be NOT to "dvr" :roll: their BS.
Turning ones mind over to Fox news is a terrible loss of ones mind.

 

[Elias824]

Im 21 now still recently out of high school and starting college. I love buying a new book for $100 then after the semester is over selling it for $2 to have it recycled.
Public school is a glorified day care, In my high school history class we colored in a map of the nations that fought in WWI. I kid you not I was 17 and I had to color in a map. The sad thing is the girl next to me was rather impressed that I actually managed to do it without having to look at the book.
In Utah they made a test called Upass, also known as UP Ass. It was a test you would have to pass in order to get your diploma, well because so many people failed they changed the rules and it ended up no mattering at all. It was like basic math and science that I a 13 year old could have passed. If I had to do that all again I would have dropped out when I was 15, gotten a GED and then gone to the community college. College is still silly but now where near as bad as public school. This is all in Utah in supposedly a "nice" school district.
Also the cizitenship grads you got in each class, if you sluffed or missed more then 5 days you got a "U" and you had to do like 4 hrs of community service. But if you sluffed every day you still only had to do 4hrs of community service. Silly

 

[Wheezer]

People wonder why jobs are leaving....it is partially due to our pathetic education system, partially because of lazy children and partially because of lazy parents. Education after 18 in this country is assumed to be a right automatically given out, it is no longer a privilege to those that work for it. In the public school system we continuously lower the standards until all the kids pass.

Who the fuck would want to hire a bunch of fucktards like what is being churned out from that meat grinder called public schools in this country?