Back when my grandmother (front, 2nd from right) was a student in this grammar school (ca. 1890) in Independence, Missouri, the textbooks the children used were precious troves of knowledge. Grandma would have been hard put to learn more than was found in her history textbook about, for example, the Battle at Lexington and Concord, because the opening West where she lived had limited academic and reference sources. Today students can find bountiful superb materials on the subject, like this, and this, and this. Today, the global knowledge commons of the internet is a far superior source for subject matter than the textbook.
The sad fact is that textbook which delivered knowledge to Grandma has become a severe limitation on what a student now can or needs to learn. The student only has to pass a test on what is in the textbook to ace her class. All the teacher has to do is manage it so most of his students pass a test on what is in the textbook. Long tail learning — following interest and curiosity deeply into the events at Lexington and Concord, for example — is not required.
Textbooks — which have in fact become mostly lesson plans and curriculum guides — need to be put openly online where students can link out from their topics into more comprehensive and bias-balancing global knowledge commons. (Today’s New York Times has an update on the battle for bias in textbook-influential Texas.)
Instead of using the online commons, this is what is happening to the textbooks students are assigned, as reported recently by FoxNews:
Dr. Frank Wang, one-time president of Saxon Publishing, says the process of producing a textbook has changed a great deal over the years. Historians and authors are increasingly being replaced by a collage of freelance writers, hoping to quickly churn out a project that will match up with curriculum standards. “The process has evolved from art to engineering,” Wang says. He adds that it’s become more of an “assembly line” system, rather than a carefully crafted “work of art.”
Gilbert T. Sewall, Director of the American Textbook Council, believes textbooks that end up in classrooms around the country have been steadily getting worse. “There’s no doubt that identity politics have contributed to the decline of textbook quality over the last twenty years,” says Sewall. He warns that vocal groups from gender activists to nutritionists have “demanded” their way into curriculum, simply by being the most vocal. Sewall says an editor at a top publishing company told him years ago that the squeaky wheel gets the attention and, “What was true then is even more true today.” In Sewall’s estimation what he calls “the Christian right” has been most persuasive in recent battles in Texas.
