Anthere wrote:
The reason why our encyclopedias have to be NPOV is because our audience is a general one. The reason why our textbooks have to be DPOV is because our audience is very focused (the biology student, for example) and we need to bring that student through the material in a logical and efficient way.
No. Wrong. One do not have to throw away NPOV just for the reason the audience is more focused. That has nothing to do.
No - you are totally wrong (stings a bit doesn't it? In the future it would be nice if you showed some respect to the opinions of others. OK?)
Logical and efficient is totally compatible with NPOV. What you suggest is "cutting" very important information, that students will later need to make informed decisions. Removing infos is neither logical nor efficient in the long term.
You are confusing a completely liberal education with the very real fact that most courses are designed to get students through a certain /limited/ set of material as efficiently as possible. In none, not one, of my college textbooks on biology is there any serious mention of Creationist viewpoints. That is /irrelevant/ information to have in a college-level biology textbook. In short; there are /separate/ classes that deal with that subject.
Same thing is true for a section of a medical textbook on abortion ; we leave out most of the history and the different political views on the subject and just talk about the procedure itself and maybe have a single paragraph at the end sating something about access to the procedure and that risks doctors face when they choose to specialize in this area.
I disagree with you Mav.
Now that is a nicer way to disagree. Was that hard?
By thus doing, we will only propose technical books, cold and disincarnated. That is against what some people consider education is.
Maybe what /you/ consider to be what education is. You are more than welcome to write liberal education textbooks that treat each area taught in a comprehensive, inter-disciplinary way. But don't stop other people from making more technically-focused works since that is what actually gets used in most college classrooms (at least in the US).
Also, most people take /separate/ classes in history, science and ethics. So the history of the how an element has been used is irrelevant to the chemistry student taking inorganic chemistry; ALL that is relevant to that student is is the chemical reactions of the element, and its properties and placement in the periodic table (of course a nice and short intro on why the element is important would be a good thing to have but not vital to the subject matter). The other stuff is optional background information that is easily found in the element's encyclopedia article.
The goal of an encyclopedia is to present a summary of the sum total of all human knowledge known about a particular subject. The goal of a textbook is to focus on one particular part of that knowledge so that students can learn about that aspect in detail.
We /already/ have a comprehensive resource in the encyclopedia for all the info about a certain element. Let's not confuse encyclopedia articles with textbook entries or otherwise a textbook project will not be differentiated enough to exist for long if at all.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)