Environmental law professor Jonathan Adler writes in the Washington Post about Environmental history errors in a high school textbook - The Washington Post
The other night I took a look at a few pages in my daughter’s U.S. History textbook (Pearson Prentice-Hall, U.S. History: Reconstruction to the Present (Ohio Edition, 2008)) concerning the growth of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, as I was curious what my daughter was learning about it. I expected to disagree with some of book’s choice of emphasis or the way certain events are portrayed. What I did not expect, however, was to find a series of plain factual errors....I'm reminded of experiences 20 years ago with my children's textbooks. I still have a letter (well, I still have the TeX file from which the letter was printed) from March 4, 1995, noting that page 197 of my 10-year-old son's science book, by Mallinson et al., defined "resistance" as "a force applied by a machine". That's the meaning of "resistance"? I added that
The Mallinson usage seems clearly counter to the ordinary English use of the word, as well as to that of traditional physics. I suspect a typographical error here, but there's no diagram, example, or calculation given which might clarify their meaning. That, I think, is a more serious problem than an erroneous definition, and I'd noticed it before with this book....It's not really fair to say that the book was wrong, because the book didn't really mean anything by its definition....it was just words. The book was not even wrong. It's a problem noted by Richard Feynman in his fairly famous encounter with the California school textbook system, some thirty years earlier, emotionally described at Corruption in textbook-adoption proceedings: 'Judging Books by Their Covers'. This has been going on for a long time. Some people don't want to allow Wikipedia as a reference, because it does have errors. Many of them. Perhaps we shouldn't allow K-12 textbooks as references either.
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