Headway English: B1 Student's Book Pack (DE/AT), with Audio-CD

Just what exactly is this book supposed to teach? Is it as it says, a book to instruct people in English, people from all walks of life, be they liberal or conservative, religious or atheist, man or woman, black or white, gay or straight, disabled or healthy? Or is it 'Introduction to Gender Studies 101', with the goal of instructing all who use it that the most oppressed people on the planet are women, of whom the ones suffering the most are young left-wing college educated white women. For a close examination of the text astonishingly reveals this book to be nearer the latter - it's literally filled with 1980s/90s feminist ideology, whether it be bogus statistics related to pay discrepancies since revealed by the gender equity movement and egalitarians to be completely misleading, or repeating hearsay long since proved to be completely unscientific.'Women earn on average 17% less than men for full time work.' Read Susanna-Hoff Sommers, Warren Farrell or Christine Bauer-Jelinek on that one. Women earn less because they study French Lit instead of Engineering, they work part-time and do far less overtime, they avoid dangerous, dirty and unhealthy work, or jobs requiring travel or long-distance commuting, they choose jobs which don't impact on their social lives as much, they choose jobs which are fulfilling and stimulating rather than high-earning, they sell less in all sales jobs and earn less commission, and they are less effective at negotiating pay rises with management. Headway's misleading sentence simply angers ill-informed women against men by making out that it is all men's fault. It makes men feel guilty for something they are not responsible for, but which lies in the hands of women. Instead, what we find is that women earn much higher salaries in part-time work than men, while women who have never had children earn significantly more than men of the same age who've never fathered children. But who's interested in the truth when it fails to show women as the eternal victim? Certainly not Headway.Even worse are exercises when people have to comment on phrases like 'Women have a higher pain threshold than men', one of the oldest of feminist chestnuts from the 60s, in the category of other myths like women and their amazing multitasking skills (google that one and have a chuckle at the reality of the situation). First of all, what does the scientific world say? It turns out that the question was quietly resolved years ago. Women's pain threshold is two thirds that of a man's, although it rises several weeks before and after giving birth to a baby.Science says:"It takes a lower temperature for a women to tell you that this feels painful," says Roger Fillingim, PhD, associate professor in the college of dentistry at the University of Florida, in Gainesville. "The laboratory studies show rather convincingly that women have a lower pain threshold and pain tolerance than men. That has been fairly consistently shown in the experimental studies that have been done."And:"The laboratory research seems to indicate that for many kinds of stimuli, women have a lower tolerance for pain," says Linda LeResche, ScD, a professor of oral medicine at the University of Washington, in Seattle.Headway says:'Some research suggests the opposite, but most people still believe this to be true because women have to give birth. We will never know how men would cope with this experience.'And who are 'Most people'? Yes, that's right - old style feminist fundamentalists and those who support their outdated and prejudiced ideology. In other words, we ignore the world's scientists, who have long since moved on to helping women cope with their lower pain thresholds. 80s/90s feminist ideology simply could not accept any indication that women were in any way weaker than men, and if it meant that scientific research had to be abandoned to make way for prejudiced hearsay, then so be it. All this is well documented and heavily criticized by critics of fundamentalist feminism like Hoff-Sommers, Farrell, et al, because lying and misleading men and women to suit a political ideology ultimately benefits nobody. Stick to the facts Headway. Then you can write and say as you please. But don't just make up facts and invent history to suit your outdated and discriminatory gender ideology.How would women handle Singaporean, Malaysian or Bruneian floggings? How would women handle live amputations without anaesthetic, which happened hundreds of thousands of times on 20th century battlefields? How would women handle the daily pain and discomfort experienced in construction work or coal mining for years on end? Simply put, evolution will not give you a higher pain threshold if it is only needed at the most every 9 months, and then only for several days. Why would evolution not have long since selected out male mammals with lower pain thresholds, as they just could not come out on top in physical confrontations with other males? How would prehistoric men and those in ancient times have coped with the chronic pain they must have put up with lifelong as a result of injuries sustained hunting and defending family and home?It would be fine if when Headway made a exercise quiz for example, they didn't just include the obligatory 'when did women get the vote' (a statistic which only seems shocking when you ignore when working class men got the vote in those countries, which in the UK - some news for you Headway - was the same year that women got the vote), but included information on MINORITIES in society: gay people, people of colour, the disabled, or heterosexual white men. For example, what about: when was slavery first declared illegal, who was the first black man to become US senator, where were gay people first allowed to marry, which was the first city in the world to introduce disabled access facilities to their public transport systems, which countries first freed men from military service, which was the first country to give unmarried men the right of access to their children, how many countries in the world today allow the flogging of men but not women, etc. Then we would know that Headway is indeed interested in human rights. But this nonsense? The rest of society can only assume that no-one else's rights are of any importance, just left-wing, college educated white women - these are the world's greatest victims. In the end, this all makes Headway explicitly sexist, and implicitly homophobic and racist.It is not my intention to tackle all the sexist statements in the book one by one, as I'd need to write a book to contain it all. Throughout the entire Headway series, teenage boys are portayed as stupid and uncooperative, teenage girls as motivated and intelligent, always correcting the silly brother. With adults it's no better. When on page 9 of this book we practice how to correct people, who do you guess is the once again making the silliest of statements, and who is the one angrily and arrogantly correcting the uneducated idiot? When we get to the homework, why is the instruction `Everything that A says is wrong! Complete B's lines as SHE corrects him'(!).In any exercise on adjectives for example, do a statistical analysis of which gender is used to illustrate words like intelligent, trustworthy, clever, mean, rude, or inconsiderate. The exercises are unashamedly biased in one direction, and my students themselves have commented on this. There's this insistence that women are right about everything, that apparently their egos are far too fragile to face the truth, or handle being corrected by a man. That such a philosophy leaves women with poor skills in that area, and that such skills are vitally important in business, something highlighted by most modern gender researchers, obviously passes Headway by.It wouldn't bother me in the least if Headway stuck to facts where women do better than men, although I'd still wonder why the need to continously boast? However, boasting about things one has really achieved could just be seen as a result of bad manners or poor breeding. Actually making up facts and THEN boasting about them, is just embarrassing. I've had so many conflict situations now in group work that I just leave out all the sexist exercises. For what happens when a man happens to keep up to date with scientific research, and tells the class for example, that the medical world has known for decades that women feel much more pain, and make much louder noises much sooner when they experience any physical discomfort? The poor guy would no doubt be labelled a 'women-hater', a troublemaker who refuses to accept the prevailing ideology that labels him inferior and weaker. And that because he chooses science over Headway. My my Headway, what a mess lying and deceiving get one into! At a later date, I plan to add an appendix to this review with tips to English teachers on how to avoid the sexism in this book in their lessons, and how not to offend students of colour or other sexual orientations. For example, get the students to do the internet research themselves, and compare results the next week. The truth on these issues is there for all to see who search for it.I wish I could get the Soars together with their gender mainstreaming connsultants, bang their heads together, and shout into their ears: 'WAKE UP you dodos! You're promoting a bogus gender ideology that started going out of date 20 years ago. Language learning books must be suitable for people of ALL political and religious persuasions - not just left-wing college educated women. When we tell the world's races and cultures that their thousands of years of philosophers, thinkers and spiritual leaders are irrelevant because a few 19th century white western philosophers said otherwise, it is at once racist and nationalist, a form of cultural fascism. That Headway supports such a conservative, reactionary view is disturbing, and it is in the interests of all those who support freedom of speech and universal human rights to inform the Soars that their prejudiced work has no place in the 21st century.