Reviewing a high-school book in social studies

World Cultures: A Global Mosaic
1996. 828 pages. ISBN of the student's edition: 0-13-831801-8.
Prentice Hall, 113 Sylvan Avenue, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 07632.

Like the 1993 Version,
This Book Is Worthless

William J. Bennetta

The 1993 version of World Cultures was the subject of three reviews published in TTL for March-April 1994 -- one review written by James Giese, one by Charles Paul, one by me. All three said World Cultures had little or nothing to do with the study of cultures.

Giese observed that the book seemed to be a mass of material that had been produced for other purposes, and he inferred that much of this material had been thrown into World Cultures as filler. World Cultures lacked any coherent idea of what the word culture meant, he said, and it could not help students to learn about cultures or cultural affairs.

Paul said that Prentice Hall's writers evidently didn't know what cultures were, and he rejected the writers' efforts to equate cultures with nation-states. He also deplored the book's incoherence, superficiality, errors of fact, and misconceived perspectives.

In my own review, I asserted that the book failed to give an account of any culture anywhere, that much of its text consisted of meaningless factoids, that it was pervaded by overt racism, and that the writers' chief skills seemed to lie in the realms of pandering and sloganeering. World Cultures, I said, was a fake.

My reading of the 1996 version hasn't given me any reason to alter that judgment.

As a part of my appraisal of the 1996 book, I randomly chose 77 of its text pages (starting with page 3 and ending with page 772), and I compared each of these with the same-numbered page in the 1993 version. Here are the chief observations which have emerged from that sampling:

• In fifty-six cases, the page in the 1996 version is identical to the corresponding page in the 1993. In twenty-one cases, the page in the 1996 version shows a change.

• Nearly all of the discernible changes are tiny. For example, a picture caption on page 23 has been revised to mention the South African election of 1994. In the caption on page 38, the word Britons is now spelled correctly. On several pages, the phrase "developing nations" replaces "Third World nations." The footnote on page 100 has been corrected, so the book no longer says that all the Bantu tongues derived from a language that nobody spoke. On page 115 an estimate of the population of Africa has been updated. On page 136 the paragraph about Ethiopia now tells that Eritrea has become an independent state. Sentences on pages 496 and 537 have been altered to reflect the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement. And the picture caption on page 667 has been changed; it no longer says that "Experiments were central to the scientific method."

• Deeper revisions are evident in only two sections of text -- one dealing with the aftermath of the Soviet Union's disintegration, the other dealing with efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. Each of these sections spans three pages or so. Each has been updated, and each is now accompanied by a new picture.

• Prentice Hall's writers have made some half-hearted efforts to soften their promotion of Christian and Islamic religious beliefs. In a passage on pages 456 and 457, the tale of the Virgin of Guadalupe -- which was endorsed as fact in the 1993 book -- is now cast as a "story." However, the passage is still fluffy and evasive, and it still lacks any resemblance to a respectable analysis of folklore. The material on Islam is still false, misleading, promotional and intolerable. A sentence on page 569 has been reworded, so the tale of Muhammad's chat with an angel is now introduced as a matter of "belief" -- but on later pages, in sentences that haven't been changed at all, the tale is still treated explicitly as fact. (As I remarked in my review of the 1993 version: If World Cultures ever got into a public-school classroom, parents would have good reason to file a suit based on the First Amendment.) The presentation of Islam is all the more disgusting because the writers prate about alleged similarities between Islam and Christianity while refusing to explicate the differences. In particular, the writers fail to disclose what Islamic scripture says about Jesus and about Christian theology.

Treacle and Whitewash

World Cultures is still a chaotic collection of bits and pieces, most of which seem to have been taken from old world-history books. It still fails to show any awareness of cultural anthropology, still fails to show any comprehension of what cultures are, and (as far as I can see) still fails to give any account of any culture anywhere.

Many false or absurd items are still in place (even the utterly nonsensical section about "Stone Age People") and the book, as a whole, is still pervaded by racism and by racial, ethnic and ideological pandering: It continues to treat various groups of people with contempt while it coats other groups with thick layers of treacle and whitewash. For example, Prentice Hall's "history" of Japanese policies and actions in the 1930s and during World War 2 is just obscurantist molasses. No student who reads it will understand why 50-year-old memories of Japanese conquests, Japanese war crimes, and Japan's hideous treatment of subjugated peoples are still affecting Japan's relations with other nations.

I would characterize World Cultures as a physical embodiment of the notion that social-studies teachers are awfully dumb -- so dumb that they will purchase any book that has pretty covers and has "cultures" or "cultural" in its title.

William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes frequently about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false "history" in schoolbooks.

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