Mrs. du Toit writes about the inaccuracies in her daughter’s Sociology textbook:

Last night Wendy told me something she’d read in her sociology textbook*. She got a great big “WHAT?” from me. So she fetched it and opened to the page where she’d read it.

It was in the section on nature vs. nuture. “It’s just wrong,” I told her. I set about to explain why it was wrong and how all of it had been disproven… a LONG TIME AGO.

Then she asked me to read another section. Wrong again.

I handed it back to her with the instruction, “Just pass the class and when it is all over, flush the contents from your brain.”

It wasn’t enough. She wanted me to read more of it and read it aloud so Kim could hear it, too. I told her I didn’t want to, because it just made me angry. She said she liked to see the expression on my face when I read it.

Our entire evening was spent going over a few other passages in the book with explanations and citations of ACTUAL science that had disproven these silly claims.

Beyond the obvious lies and distortions, the thing that was interesting to me is that it wasn’t a college level textbook, at least from the perspective of the textbooks I had in college. It was written exactly the way the remedial reading cards were written for 7th graders.

Wendy is lucky that she had someone to talk to who knew the facts to disprove this stuff. Most students don’t, and it’s a shame that there’s no accountability for these publishers publishing textbooks that are wrong, not because of simple mistakes on their part, but apparently out of bias and an unwillingness to even try to get the facts right.