Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Second-hand bookshops are full of reviewers' discards. There must be books I have written among them, but none that I have reviewed.

When I read a book it becomes part of me, and if I possess it I cannot bear to part with it. Even books I dislike nearly always have something worth retaining for future reference. Only once did I find a book I reviewed so repulsive that I simply threw it away and tried to expunge it from my memory. It became a bestseller.

Writers who aspire to art or scholarship need not regret, for their own sakes, the success of drivel. There is still room in the bookshops for them to earn honourable compensation. They have the reward of virtuous self-sacrifice if they fail. No one I could respect would want to be tainted by association with books by the historical snake-oil salesmen who purport to prove that Christ's progeny formerly occupied the throne of France, or ascribe the exploration of the Zaire and the colonisation of Rhode Island to Chinese mariners in 1421, or claim that the outcome of the American Revolutionary War was settled in 1776, or represent civilisation as the achievement of extraterrestrials.

But it would be a mistake to shrug off these supercheries as harmless fun - the book-length equivalents of reports in the National Enquirer or Sunday Sport , on a par with sightings of Elvis in Tesco. These books numb minds already half-paralysed by critical deficiency. They sucker the stupid, who are surely afflicted enough already. The consequences can be profoundly corrupting and even dangerous for the world. The thesis of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail has generated a multimillion-dollar industry. Its ideas have bolstered anti-religious prejudice. The Chinese Prime Minister has alluded to 1421 and appropriated its absurd claims for propaganda; 1776 , I fear, may boost some US readers' uncritical patriotism at a time when the country needs candid self-examination.

The huge uptake of sensationalist trash is a reproach to our age. How can so many people be so devoid of sense as to pay good money for such stuff? Of course, consumers enjoy all sorts of irrational expenditure on peculiar pleasures. I can never fully comprehend the priorities of gamblers and drug-addicts or enthusiasts for pornography or celebrity fanzines - but at least I know how they get their thrills or comfort.

Some people blame the publishers and promoters for the bad bestsellers, but that is a characteristically contemporary evasion, like blaming coca farmers for crack gangs or doughnut vendors for obesity. People are responsible for their own vices. Publishers are entitled to exploit them by serving the demands of the market. They have no role in censoring bad writers on behalf of society (except in obedience to laws on incitement to hatred or to crime). When they do publish a book, it is their duty to do their best to sell it.

If we have millions of addle-brained readers in the world, the blame lies with those of us who have educated them, or with social and political pressures that prevent us from doing a good job. The aim of education is to inculcate a rational, critical intelligence, or, as Harold Macmillan once said, "to enable you to tell when someone is talking rot".

Now curricula are crammed with distractions. Governments want economically useful, vocationally qualified dummies, schooled to conform rather than to rebel. Parents want children trained for the treadmill, not educated into honourable unemployability. Political correctness demands adherence to shibboleths. The "knowledge economy" privileges information over discrimination. Information overkill stifles minds. Websites appear on screen in order of popularity. Rubbish is therefore always high on the list, and most users have no way of distinguishing good information from bad. Public information campaigns encourage people to believe slogans, trust PR and suspend scepticism.

Exams overvalue uncritically absorbed data, which is easy to mark.

Multiple-choice questions are actively anti-educational; they disadvantage creative students, who supply answers the examiners failed to anticipate.

Textbooks often suppress debate because publishers fear students will be confused by unanswered questions or open-ended controversies.

I recently finished writing a huge global history textbook for US undergraduates. I had to fight to be allowed to include unsolved problems: I was told that they might undermine the book's authority and that teachers would not be able to set tests on them. Most current university teachers, I suspect, know the hazards of getting students to read books that are wrong, in the hope of stimulating a critical response - all too often the students end up misled because they have not been taught that vital spark of a lively mind: distrust.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is Prince of Asturias professor of history at Tufts University in the US.