The fourth-grade Romanian language and literature textbook spread pseudoscience and mystic views, news portal Digi24 writes. It quotes from the textbook which says that the Sphinx (pictured above), a natural rock formation in the Bucegi mountains “exhibits a rare magnetic phenomenon which has beneficial properties (…) over a one square kilometer area where the body is immune to fatigue and is suddenly invigorated”.
It also says the region, known as Babele – a larger group of natural rock formations – is “the gate of Heaven, a place of sacred and beneficial nature”.
The textbook bases the assumptions on “experts”, without giving any identifiable reference.
Digi24 reminds that Romanian textbooks – whose authors are paid up to RON 40,000 ($9,645) per book and which must be approved by the Ministry of Education – often contain mistakes. In biology books the length of the blood vessels in the human body is alternatively given as 96,000 km in some books and 160,000 km in others (in fact at around 100,000 km it is closer to the first figure).
One geography manual identifies the Red Sea as the Dead Sea (unlike in English, dead and red are very different words in Romanian) and in the first-grade math textbook, which correctly places the “greater-than” sign between 12 and 16 (12<16), the text itself says that 12 is bigger than 16. Former education minister (and mathematics teacher) Liviu Pop even went as far as to say that “in some cases, 12 is, in fact, greater than 16”.
