[Phys-L] Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries - PART 2
From: rrhake at EARTHLINK.NET (Richard Hake)
Date: Sat Oct 22 19:43:14 2005
PART 2
REFERENCES
AHA. 2003. American Humanist Association, "HUMANISM AND ITS
ASPIRATIONS: Humanist Manifesto III," a successor to the original
Humanist Manifesto of 1933; online at
<http://www.americanhumanist.org/3/HumandItsAspirations.php>." The
list of signatories (click on "Original Signatories") includes 21
Nobel Laureates: Philip W. Anderson (Physics, 1977); Paul D. Boyer
(Chemistry, 1997); Owen Chamberlain (Physics, 1959); Francis Crick
(Medicine, 1962); Paul J. Crutzen (Chemistry, 1995); Pierre-Gilles de
Gennes (Physics, 1991); Johann Deisenhofer (Chemistry, 1988); Jerome
I. Friedman (Physics, 1990); Sheldon Glashow (Physics, 1979); Herbert
A. Hauptman (Chemistry, 1985); Dudley Herschbach (Chemistry, 1986);
Harold W. Kroto (Chemistry, 1996); Yuan T. Lee (Chemistry, 1986);
Mario J. Molina (Chemistry, 1995); Erwin Neher (Medicine, 1991); Ilya
Prigogine (Chemistry, 1977); Richard J. Roberts (Medicine, 1993);
John E. Sulston (Medicine, 2002); Henry Taube (Chemistry, 1983); E.
Donnall Thomas (Medicine, 1990); James Dewey Watson (Medicine, 1962).
Ansbacher, T. 2000. "An interview with John Dewey on science
education." The Physics Teacher 38(4): 224-227; freely online at
<http://www.scienceservs.com/id13.html> as a 1.3 MB pdf. A thoughtful
and well-researched treatment showing the consonance of Dewey's
educational ideas (as quoted straight from Dewey's own writings, not
from the accounts of sometimes confused Dewey interpreters) with the
thinking of most current science-education researchers. Ansbacher's
valuable web site is at <http://www.scienceservs.com>.
Hake, R.R. 2005a. "Re: HUMAN EVENTS Article: Ten Most Harmful Books
of the 19th and 20th Centuries," online at
<http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0510&L=pod&O=D&P=14368>.
Post of 20 Oct 2005 16:55:42-0700 to American-Philosophy, Dewey-L,
Math-Learn, PhysLrnR, POD, TeachingEdPsych, TIPS; latter sent to
AERA-C, AERA-GSL, AERA-J, AERA-L; and then to Biopi-L, Chemed-L,
Physoc, and (in corrected form - see Hake (2005b) to Phys-L.
Hake, R.R. 2005b. Re: HUMAN EVENTS Article: Ten Most Harmful Books of
the 19th and 20th Centuries - Correction," online at
<http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0510&L=pod&O=D&P=15571>.
Post of 21 Oct 2005 13:32:50 -0700 to American-Philosophy, Dewey-L,
Math-Learn, PhysLrnR, POD, TeachingEdPsych, TIPS; latter sent to
AERA-C, AERA-GSL, AERA-J, AERA-L; and then to Biopi-L, Chemed-L, and
Physoc.
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APPENDIX #1
AMONG THE TOP 10 (in order of the judge's rating)
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5. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION
[See above]
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7. THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
Author: Betty Friedan
Publication date: 1963
Score: 30
Summary: In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921,
disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in "a
comfortable concentration camp"--a role that degraded women and
denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding
president of the National Organization for Women. Her original
vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing
journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of
Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel
Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that "Friedan
was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist
Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America's Cold War
fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist
physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley's radiation lab
with J. Robert Oppenheimer."
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8. THE COURSE OF POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY
Author: Auguste Comte
Publication date: 1830-1842
Score: 28
Summary: Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that
survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and
cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, "I have naturally ceased
to believe in God." Later, in the six volumes of The Course of
Positive Philosophy, he coined the term "sociology." He did so while
theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond "theology" (a
belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through
"metaphysics" (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries'
reliance on abstract assertions of "rights" without a God), to
"positivism," in which man alone, through scientific observation,
could determine the way things ought to be.
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10. GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST AND MONEY
Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publication date: 1936
Score: 23
Summary: Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton
and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the
Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government.
When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus
of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing
and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as
U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual
budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.
HONORABLE MENTION (in order of the judge's rating)
These books won votes from two or more judges:
The Population Bomb
by Paul Ehrlich
Score: 22
On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill
Score: 18
The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
Score: 17
Coming of Age in Samoa
by Margaret Mead
Score: 11
Unsafe at Any Speed
by Ralph Nader
Score: 11
Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
Score: 10
Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson
Score: 9
The Greening of America
by Charles Reich
Score: 9
The Limits to Growth
by Club of Rome
Score: 4
Descent of Man
by Charles Darwin
Score: 2
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APPENDIX #2
THE JUDGES [URL's courtesy R.R. Hake and Google]
These 15 scholars and public policy leaders served as judges in
selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books.