What Your Second Grader Needs to Know : Fundamentals of a Good Second Grade EducationRevised

Rating:
Summary: Great Book for the Minivan!
Review: We keep the age appropriate book for each of our boys in the car. They'll read anything when stuck in the car for long trips and even when waiting for one brother to finish with scouts or soccer. The books have led to wonderful conversations about science and literature and even math. I think these books are a valuable supplement to my boys' education.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book for the Minivan!
Review: We keep the age appropriate book for each of our boys in the car. They'll read anything when stuck in the car for long trips and even when waiting for one brother to finish with scouts or soccer. The books have led to wonderful conversations about science and literature and even math. I think these books are a valuable supplement to my boys' education.

Rating:
Summary: A useful book, but...
Review: While many of the sections in this book are very well done (Language and Literature, Music, Visual Arts), I was struck by the disproportionate space devoted to relatively minor historical figures apparently based solely on race and gender considerations. This book exemplifies the worst aspects of political correctness. For example, the History and Geography section devotes an entire page (with photograph) to Rosa Parks while yielding only half a page (no picture) to Abraham Lincoln. Even more telling, the Science section profiles only four people, but two of them are relatively obscure black men (Daniel Williams and Elijah McCoy). Major figures like Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein, and Jonas Salk didn't make the cut, but the man who invented the "automatic lubricator" (McCoy) merited a page and a half with photograph. Many of the biographies are framed in long discourses on racial and sexual discrimination. The message of many of the chapters seems to be that white, European males are evil and that non-whites, non-Europeans, and females are saintly. These themes are repeated in such an embarassingly obvious and heavy-handed way that my wife and I simply skipped entire sections which looked more like PC propaganda than an honest attempt to present information. Sorry, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., but MY second grader needs to know more than this.