thursday, february 10, 2005
Smirking is good for you
My 1994-era Health class textbook is full of awful ’80s stock photos and misguided features about alternative medicine. Here are selected scans and some quotes from a critical review of the book and an overwrought condemnation of its “Cultural Diversity” sections:
The peach is actually neon orange, but my scanner is old.
Let me acknowledge immediately that Holt Health is not the first health text to be written by charlatans, nor is it the first to use falsity, unsupported claims and double-talk to sell superstition and quackery. But I can’t recall any earlier book that endorsed the utterly nonsensical notions that are promoted in Holt Health, nor can I recall any earlier book that tried so hard to confuse and deceive the student. The Holt writers have gone to unprecedented lengths in their efforts to attack rationality and to undermine the student’s ability to think rationally about biomedical matters.
On page 476 the writers make a claim that is deceptive: “. . . the truth is that many teenagers are not sexually active.” But that vague statement has no quantitative meaning, and it is not an accurate representation of the quantitative information that we actually have in hand: Of the teenagers who stay in school, some 70% are sexually active by the time they are in the 12th grade. When Holt’s writers make their claim about “the truth,” they are not being truthful at all. They are promoting wishful thinking as if it were fact, and they are misrepresenting an important aspect of life among today’s teenaged population. Students will know this.
Bonus: showerdude!
comments (1)
Goddamn hippies.
– phil on 2/11/2005 08:26:21
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