Students are fed superstition dressed up as science.
For a number of years, a mini-curriculum called the "African-American Baseline Essays" has been circulating all over the U.S. Many urban school districts, including Atlanta, the District of Columbia, and Detroit, have adopted the essays, which focus on ancient African civilizations, especially ancient Egypt. The motives of school districts that put the curriculum into their classrooms were good. They wanted to encourage African-American students to raise their sights by having them learn about the accomplishments of African civilizations. But the baseline essays, which include a lot of pseudo-history and pseudo-science, are a terrible way of achieving this. The science baseline essay, in particular, is full of quackery masquerading as science.
Why didn't scientists rise up to expose the science baseline essay? I don't know. With a few exceptions, they have been silent. But now, an article in Education Week (February 21, 1995) says the scientific community is making a serious effort to reveal the essay for the dangerous nonsense that it is. A group of scientists, who are mainly African-American, are holding a series of meetings funded by the national Science Foundation to discuss its errors in fact and approach, and they will also be writing a book on the subject. According to Education Week, one of the scientists compares teaching this kind of pseudo-science to giving heroin to patients who have tumors: "It makes them feel better, but it doesn't solve the problem."
What exactly is wrong with the science baseline essay? The excellence of ancient Egyptian mathematicians, physicians, and astronomers is widely acknowledged, but the baseline essay is not content with their real and considerable achievements. Students who learn science from the baseline essay will be told that the Egyptians developed the theory of evolution (thousands of years before Darwin), understood quantum mechanics, and flew around for business and pleasure in full-size gliders. These absurd claims, which no serious scientist accepts, are reminiscent of the kind of thing we used to laugh at the Soviets for saying: Everything of any importance, including baseball, was invented in the U.S.S.R.
But the science baseline essay does not merely exaggerate the achievements of Egyptian science. It presents, as science, stuff that is no more scientific than the horoscopes in the daily newspaper or Mme. Rosa, the fortuneteller. Students whose teachers use this curriculum will learn that the Egyptians could predict lucky and unlucky days with the help of "astrophysical 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"). They will be fed superstition dressed up as science.
Even worse, the baseline essay pushes racist concepts like "melanism," the theory that blacks are genetically superior to other races because they have more melanin in their skin. Joseph L. Graves, an African-American scientist who teaches evolutionary biology at Arizona State University West, points out that this is the same kind of "pseudo-scientific biological determinism" that is used to assert that blacks are less intelligent than whites. According to the Education Week story, Graves cited Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murrays' 1994 book The Bell Curve, which explains the IQ gap between blacks and whites in terms of superior white genes. But of course he could also have pointed to Adolph Hitler's racial theories.
The science baseline essay is a good example of the kind of curriculum we don't need. It uses pseudo-science to promote a political agenda. At the same time, it cheats students of a chance to find out what real science is like, and it deprives them of a foundation on which to build future learning. This would be bad news for any of our youngsters; it is criminal for poor, minority students. The achievement gap between these students-- especially African-Americans -- and whites, middle-class students has narrowed considerably during the last 20 years, but it continues to be a disgrace and a danger to our nation. We will not close it with curricula like the "science" baseline essay.
The science baseline essay also raises a more general question related to standards. There is now a push to raise the educational standards for U.S. students, but who should set these standards? A large number of people seem willing to give states the say in setting some basic standards about what students should know, as long as certain options are left to local school districts. But shouldn't we consider setting standards for what students shouldn't learn as well as for what they should? There is a lot of opposition to the phony science of the Right, as exemplified in creationism, but what about the phony science of the Left that is on view in the baseline essays? Surely students need to be protected from both extremes.