<<Sadly, textbooks designed for public schools are the result of a
mass-market economy ... Texts are to publishers as fast food is to
franchises. With a guaranteed market, the goal is the delivery of
palatable nutrition or information to the broadest possible audience,
not a memorable meal or learning experience, respectively.>>
I hope that Thorson will examine standard and "reform math" books in a
future column.
=================
courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-thorson0628.artjun28,0,2411376.story
Courant.com
Tarzan: A Great Jumping-Off Point
June 28, 2007
I recommend the pulp fiction Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs for
reading across the curriculum in middle and high schools. These juicy
adventure novels would agitate bored students to learn more about
human evolution, colonial racism, gender relations, plot technique,
and body movement than their dumbed-down, politically correct,
spiritually bland and dated textbooks.
Sadly, textbooks designed for public schools are the result of a mass-
market economy where publishing corporations defer to cautious
administrators, who defer to school boards, who defer to the voters.
Anything remotely provocative will send the buyer elsewhere. Texts are
to publishers as fast food is to franchises. With a guaranteed market,
the goal is the delivery of palatable nutrition or information to the
broadest possible audience, not a memorable meal or learning
experience, respectively.
To see how vetted and dated texts are, I ask you to monitor how long
(if ever) it will take for the publishers to respond to a great idea
that Tarzan, a.k.a. Lord Greystoke, would have loved. In this month's
Science, three British authors combined field observations about
orangutans with vertebrate anatomy, paleontology and paleoecology to
re-interpret the conventional wisdom about human walking.
When Tarzan wanted to move through the jungle quickly and safely, he
did so above the ground, swinging on vines, running on branches and
leaping from tree to tree. According to the new study, titled "Origin
of Human Bipedalism As an Adaptation for Locomotion on Flexible
Branches," this is where the original adaptation for human walking
occurred. This idea is so cool that it should be dangled as a morsel
in front of every public high-school school student, especially young
alpha males.
But I doubt if you will see it in their texts for years, if ever. To
expose impressionable young minds to the dangerous fact that humans
learned to walk with the monkeys would be unthinkable to a parent
believing that humans were either created in God's image or are the
perfected end products of evolution.
Every text covering the animal "kingdom" should be honest enough to
mention that humans are animals. They should be accurate enough to
question the conventional wisdom that our antecedents came down from
the trees and learned to knuckle-walk as chimps before standing fully
upright. They should be interesting enough to link bipedal walking on
terra firma to forest fragmentation and expansion of the savannah as
the climate became drier. How many texts meet these standards today?
According to the new study, upright walking did not evolve to free up
the hands for making tools, to carry an infant, to hold weapons or to
forage for food. Nor did it evolve to help humans reduce their
exposure to the overhead sun or to enhance "full frontal" displays of
dominance. Instead, upright walking evolved as an adaptation for
horizontal movement on springy branches within the tree canopy, either
to travel from tree to tree, to reach food, or escape predation.
The most effective way for a large animal to move on wiggling branches
is to fully extend the lower limbs between the foot and the hips while
using long arms for balance. This original upright condition was
retained by the orangutan lineage. It was lost by ground-dwelling
chimpanzees and gorillas, whose locomotion in trees is more vertical
than horizontal. It was retained by our antecedents who modified it
for life on land. This explains why the earliest well-known member of
our lineage (Australopithecus afarensis) was a fairly good walker and
why we (Homo sapiens) have unnecessarily long arms. Being able to
pitch a fastball or throw a spear is a throwback to a time when we
first learned to walk.
The Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs were the first to transport
me away from conventional middle-class life. I read them in elementary
school, picking up tidbits of zoology, ecology, anthropology and
technology along the way. I read them in college, discovering the
author's white male chauvinism, which today could be used to ignite
multicultural student discussion. I read one in Spanish a few years
ago to help learn the language.
Learning can be fun, textbooks notwithstanding.
Robert M. Thorson is a professor of geology at the University of
Connecticut's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a member of The
Courant's Place Board of Contributors. His column appears every
Thursday. He can be reached at profthorson@hotmail.com.
.
|
