BAD BOOKS
Last year, the Texas educational bureaucracy recently reviewed and approved a new set of textbooks for the public school system. A group of parents, concerned about the information their children were coming home with, conducted their own review. They found 231 errors, including such more-than-bloopers like Napoleon winning the battle of Waterloo, President Truman dropping the atom bomb on Korea, and General Douglas MacArthur leading the anti- communist campaign in the 1950’s (it was actually Senator Joe McCarthy.) When called to account for these errors, the bureaucrats studied the texts again, and found more than the 231 errors the parents first found. The parents found more… until now the tally stands at 5200 mistakes in texts published by Prentice-Hall, Houghton Mifflin, Rinehart and Winston. How did the publishers react to this mess? One publisher’s spokesperson argued that, “except for the errors,” everyone agreed that these were the finest textbooks they had ever seen. “Except for the errors…” “Except for the error…” that…
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