High School Textbooks Be Gone!!
Today's New York Times runs an article entitled, "Schoolbooks are Given F's in Originality." According to this article, textbooks by different authors share content too similar to call chance. The article states:
Just how similar passages showed up in two books is a tale of how the largely obscure $4 billion a year world of elementary and high school textbook publishing often works, for these passages were not written by the named authors but by one or more uncredited writers. And while it is rare that the same language is used in different books, it is common for noted scholars to give their names to elementary and high school texts, lending prestige and marketing power, while lesser known writers have a hand in the books and their frequent revisions.It's not surprising that textbooks share similar language. After all, textbooks describe incredibly superficial aspects of events. Often, no analysis or evaluation is included. Here's, for example, the description contained in two history books of New York City on 9/11.
In New York City, the impact of the fully fueled jets caused the twin towers to burst into flames. The fires led to the catastrophic collapse of both 110-story buildings as well as other buildings in the area. The numbers of people missing and presumed dead after this assault was estimated to be 2,750.While the Times article considers textbook authorship, I can't help but wonder why highshoolers need textbooks in the first place. Reading the above paragraph simply asks students to passively ingest information about New York City on 9/11. The paragraph doesn't ask them to consider anything deeply? Reading textbooks promotes intellectual laziness.
Certainly, students and teachers could find information about New York City on 9/11 somewhere other than the textbook. For example the Internet- now that very inexpensive computers are available (See a recent blog entry and associated comments). This search process alone would require higher order thinking skills. However, while students searched they could ask questions about information that they found and further investigate these questions.
Consider a few of the questions that could stem from the above paragraph about New York City on 9/11:
1. What does it mean for a jet to be fully fueled?
2. How did the impact of jets hitting the Twin Towers cause the building to burst into flame?
3. What other buildings collapsed?
4. What was the function of the buildings that collapsed?
Asking and answering these questions, using resources readily available to students, could promote critical thinking, investigation and analysis.
Ok, readers might suggest that students don't have to find information beyond a textbook to ask questions about information contained in the textbook. However, my response pertains to finances. Purchasing textbooks for large groups of students can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Why spend the money on textbooks when similar information, no - better information, could be found elsewhere?
posted by Andrew Pass @ 8:39 AM
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4 Comments:
I'm not a huge textbook fan. In fact, the only real use I see for them in English (besides as an anchor for beginning teachers who aren't yet strong in their curriculum and subject matter) is to save us from making thousands of pages of photocopies.
I do believe they are more necessary for subjects like math and science, but at the same time, how much do those subjects really change? I have three high school literature anthologies on my shelf at home--one that my mother used in high school, one that I used in high school, and one that I teach out of now. Many of the stories are the same, but somehow the book itself keeps growing in size (and in cost) with each new iteration.
While I understand they are necessary, and I have found the occasional good resource in mine, I'd much prefer to have a volume of selected short stories, a volume of selected poetry, a volume of selected non-fiction, and none of the boxes full of supplementary materials that the school pays for but that I rarely (if ever) use.
I tend to agree. Like La Maestra, I think anthologies would serve Language Arts just as well as textbooks, and be a lot cheaper, and free of all the propaganda. Why not promote technology and inquiry, with having students research background, biographical, and critical information themselves on the Internet?
Textbooks are needed for the simple reason that the bureaucracy of standardized testing requires them. Textbooks in Language Arts tend to promote critical analysis of very short/abbreviated stories, analysis that is much more useful in the context of the test than in actual learning. The AP History exams do nothing but test the passively ingested information, "superficial aspects". There's simply not enough time for a more in-depth analysis. Math and Science have always been very testable subjects, and therefore textbooks work much better in teaching students those subjects. To teach a student critical thinking, one can and probably should dispense with the textbooks, but critical thinking isn't a skill valued much by society today anyway.
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