Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 320.473
EAN num: 9780618556625
ISBN number: 0618556621
Label: Houghton Mifflin Company
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Company
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 588
Printing Date: September 13, 2005
Publishing house: Houghton Mifflin Company
Sale Popularity Level: 251545
Studio: Houghton Mifflin Company
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Product Description:
Acclaimed for the scholarship of its prominent authors and the clarity of its narrative, American Government sets the standard for public policy coverage while maintaining focus on three fundamental topics: the institutions of American government; the historical development of governmental procedures, actors, and policies; and who governs in the United States and to what end.
Proven pedagogical features involve students in the material , including chapter outlines, suggested web links for research, and How Things Work boxes that summarize basic information and important facts.
- Components of the media package include web resources such as primary source documents, election ads, audio clips, and interactive activities. Most of the features include related pedagogy or critical-thinking questions.
- Chapter pedagogy that encourages critical thinking includes Who governs? And to What Ends? questions that open each chapter to engage students in the material, and Reconsidering Who Governs and Reconsidering to What Ends at the close of the chapter to emphasize the complexity of the questions.
- Landmark Cases features identify influential Supreme Court decisions in areas such as affirmative action, the media, and foreign affairs.
- What Would You Do? boxes in relevant chapters help students act as decision makers by presenting them with a realistic domestic policy issue, which they can consider in a paper or class discussion.
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Rated by buyers -
This textbook has generated a firestorm of controversy. Here are some direct quotations from the text.
"The Supreme Court has ruled that children cannot pray in public schools . . . " (p. 86)
"Students pray in front of a high school in Virginia. The Supreme Court will not let this happen inside a public school." (caption beneath a photograph, p. 111)
"Since 1947 the Court has applied the wall-of-separation theory to strike down as unconstitutional every effort to have any form of prayer in public schools . . ." (p. 112)
". . . long after the Supreme Court had decided that praying and Bible reading could not take place in public schools . . ." (p. 460)
These statements are false. State-sponsored prayer is what is prohibited. It would have been a simple matter for the authors to have written that. What they chose to do instead is promote the canard that the Supreme Court is prohibiting children from praying in school. The Supreme Court has never said any such a thing.
This is all the worse because John DiIulio is the former head of George Bush's "Faith-based Initiative," and a well-known proponent of what he calls a balanced approach to religion in the public sphere. He has every right to promote his view, no less because I disagree with him. He has no right to mis-state the facts to support it, especially in a student textbook.
The text's main discusion on school prayer is found at pp. 110-113. It begins with the standard know-nothing bromide that the First Amendment does not "clearly require the 'separation of church and state.'" That may be the authors' opinion. Our Supreme Court has consistently held otherwise.
These pages amount to an indictment of our Constitutional framework. The authors complain that the drafters of the First Amendment could have adopted other language from earlier drafts, which read "no religion shall be established by law" and "no national religion shall be established." Yes, they could have, but they didn't, and that is the point. The authors focus exclusively on the clarity of these earlier drafts, completely ignoring the fact that their rejection clearly shows that for the drafters clarity was not the only issue. Obviously, they intended something broader, namely, the wall of separation that these authors obviously do not believe in and do not like.
I think the men who drafted the First Amendment got it right, and so have our courts. I think government has no business meddling in religion, or peddling it. I think religion thrives precisely because the government stays out of it.
However, what I think is not the point. Regardless what I believe or the authors believe, a student textbook is not an appropriate place for them to peddle their politics, especially by writing things that simply are not true.
This is appropriately a scandal. Authors with a political slant tried to use a textbook to indoctrinate, not educate, and not just on this issue - and they got caught. It is a pity because when they are not writing about controversial subjects, they write a good book.
These authors, the publisher and College Board should be ashamed of themselves for letting this happen. These and other inaccuracies are inexcusable, and should be corrected without further delay.
Rated by buyers 
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Generally, we trust textbooks to provide us with facts. This one provides us instead with opinions that are based on faulty facts. I can certainly understand trying to defend more conservative ideologies in another forum, but slipping this nonsense into classrooms to indoctrinate unsuspecting students with lies and prejudice is completely indefensible. Buying this book means that you are a bad person.
Rated by buyers -
The book contains multiple factual errors and examples of bias, especially in sections about supreme court decisions and environmental issues. Do your students a favor and choose a better book.
Rated by buyers -
The latest edition's chapter on "Environmental Policy" contains a discusion of global warming so biased and misleading it would humble a tobacco industry PR man:
* "It is a foolish politician who yesterday opposes environmentalism. And that creates a problem, because not all environmental issues are equally deserving of support. Take the case of global warming." (p. 559)
* "The earth has become warmer, but is this mostly the result of natural climate changes, or is it heavily influenced by humans putting greenhouse gases into the air?" (p.559)
* "On the one hand, a warmer globe will cause sea levels to rise, threatening coastal communities; on the other hand, greater warmth will make it easier and cheaper to grow crops and avoid high heating bills." (p. 559)
* "But many other problems are much less clear-cut. Science doesn't know how bad the green-house effect is." (p. 566)
These are not quotes from oil company press releases. These and other such statements are made by the authors of American Government in the same omnipotent, textbook tone with which we are all familiar.
Two of the world's most respected climate scientists, Dr. James Hansen and Dr. Michael MacCracken, have weighed in with Houghton Mifflin to denounce the book and demand revisions. "I find it alarming that a widely-used textbook from a respected publisher would contain so many gross errors," wrote Hansen. "Failure to correct the book's errors will leave students gravely misinformed about the facts and science of global warming, one of the most serious problems that we as a society and a species face."
Rated by buyers 
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I never thought I'd be interested in gov't until I read this. It tells what the founders were thinking when they instituted this gov't we have and what their intentions were when they wrote the constitution. I thought that the gov't was here for the fat cats to sit on their butts and live off us all, but when I learned that the ppl that wrote everything had the interests of the gen. pop. in mind I thought that was pretty darn cool!
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