We're in the midst of an important change in our school curriculum. By including the contributions of many different groups that have not previously been recognized, we're trying to make a multicultural curriculum that accurately reflects our society.

However, some groups, including the New York State Board of Regents, which has just accepted guidelines for a new social studies curriculum, may end up sacrificing accuracy for diversity. They seem to think that, in order to give kids varied points of view, it is perfectly OK to teach ideas and theories that few or no reputable scholars accept. The Regents' proposal calls this using "noncanonical knowledge and techniques" and "nondominant knowledge sources."

You can see some good examples of what's wrong with this idea in the Portland (Oregon) "African-American Baseline Essays." This mini-curriculum, made up of essays on social studies, science, language arts, mathematics, art and music, has been adopted by school systems all over the country and used as a model by many others.

The Portland essays present ancient Egypt as an African culture that strongly influenced the development of European civilization, and this is fair enough. It's a view most reputable scholars have agreed with for 40 years, and it corrects distortions of previous historians who were inclined to ignore Egypt's contribution or to disregard the fact that Egypt was an African civilization. But the baseline essays go far beyond discussing Egypt as an African society, and they assert a number of ideas that are inconsistent with the best scholarship. For instance, they maintain that the inhabitants of ancient Egypt were black Africans.

Scholars of Egyptian history and archeology say that the evidence suggests an entirely different story. Far from being all black ( or all white), ancient Egypt, they say, was a multiracial society with a variety of racial types much like that of modern Egypt. In any case, our concept of race -- a relatively modern invention -- would not have made much sense to ancient Egyptians, who did not look at people in terms of skin color or hair texture. So the baseline essays not only misrepresent the evidence by insisting that Egypt was a black African society; they distort the example that Egypt has to offer our own multiracial society in order to make a political point.

The science section of the baseline essays reveals the same preference for politics over scholarship. The ancient Egyptians' excellence in mathematics, medicine and astronomy is widely acknowledged. For example, we owe our 365-day, 12-month year to them. But kids who learn science from this baseline essay will be told that the Egyptians developed the theory of evolution (thousands of years before Darwin), understood quantum physics and flew around for business and pleasure in full-size gliders -- all stuff that no serious scientist believes for a minute. We used to laugh at the Soviets for saying that baseball and everything else of any importance had been discovered or invented in the USSR These claims for Egyptian science are no more credible, and they are equally political m nature; they are propaganda rather than science. But this is not the biggest problem.

The science baseline essay presents as science stuff that is no more scientific than the Ouiji board or mediums or the horoscope in the daily newspaper. Although the essay says it's important to distinguish between science and magic, it treats magic like a legitimate part of science. Kids whose teachers follow the Portland curriculum will be told that the Egyptians could predict lucky and unlucky days with the help of "astropsychological treatises"; and they'll hear how the Egyptians' highly developed "human capabilities" allowed them to see events before they happened ("precognition") or at a distance ("remote viewing"). Ideas like these make good subjects for movies or TV series, but they have nothing to do with science. Kids who are fed this kind of thing are not getting an alternative perspective; they are being cheated.

School boards and teachers accept the legitimacy of what's said in the baseline essays because they assume that the writers have solid credentials -- and the introduction to the essays plays along with this. The writer of the science essay is described as a "Research Scientist of the Argonne National Laboratories, Chicago," implying that the essay was written by a top-notch scientist, perhaps with the endorsement of a federally funded lab. But it turns out that the writer is not a scientist at all. According to Argonne, he's an industrial-hygiene technician with a high school diploma whose job is collecting air samples.

We all want to improve the achievement of our students. And poor, minority children, whose performance still lags far behind that of white, middle-class kids, deserve the best education possible. They're not going to get it if we substitute myths for history or magic for science. Here's how Frank Snowden, a professor emeritus of classics at Howard University, puts it:


Many students already have been misled and confused by
Afrocentrists' inaccuracies and omissions in their treatment of
blacks in the ancient Mediterranean world. The time has come
for Afrocentrists to cease mythologizing and falsifying the past.
The time has come for scholars and educators to insist upon
scholarly rigor and truth in current and projected revisions of
our curriculum. Tempus fugit!