School Textbook Problems: A Roundtable

How do passages like this get into textbooks: "We captured three women. They scratched and bit those who were leading them and did not want to follow us. However, we killed them, skinned them, and delivered the skins to Carthage"? This "attractive" story from A. Kazakov's geography textbook (Samara: Fedorov Corporation, 1996), for second-graders (!) represents one of the "wonders" written by the ancient traveler and trader Hanno, for the purpose of scaring off possible successors among competitors from the route that he had developed. ... You can hardly blame Hanno himself, but some of our contemporaries would do well to think about the wisdom of the saying, "It is not given to us to guess how our words will be taken."