Textbooks be more student-friendly

Bruce D Price :
They couldn’t be worse if somebody tried to make them that way. In fact, that’s apparently what happened.
For years I’ve been analyzing Whole Word (a way to teach reading) and Reform Math (widely used to teach math). My conclusion is that both are inferior approaches, embraced despite huge evidence against them. You have to wonder about the “experts” behind such bad methods.
I started to suspect that people who would design such inefficient reading and math curricula would not stop there. When they came to the task of producing books to teach biology, chemistry, history, and the other school subjects, we would expect to find this same disregard of what works best. How could I test this hypothesis?
With, as they say, a heavy heart, I realized I had to find and study some typical textbooks. But how? I thought about stopping at local schools to talk to librarians. I checked the Yellow Pages for businesses that sell used textbooks….Then almost as an afterthought I Googled this phrase: “middle school biology textbook.”
I was taken to a review of “Life Science” (1991, 645 pages). The review was uniformly hostile, noting that aspects of the book were “eccentric, confused, uninformed, anachronistic… obscure…. brains-off… repellent., full of nonsense.” The book consisted of only two sections, 140 pages on ecology, and 480 pages on human anatomy. This for ninth-graders. What an absurdity. That such a book could come into existence, or be adopted by a single school, tells us how debased our education system has become.
Of course, I was delighted to find my hypothesis confirmed with so little effort. I had stumbled into a wonderful new and helpful world, namely the Textbook League, a project launched three decades ago by William Bennetta.
This is a man who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, or badly written textbooks. The majority of the 200+ reviews on his site are beat-downs.
In short, authors and publishers had done exactly what I predicted. They made books (especially those for ordinary students) that were so horrendous that you can just about rule out any improvement in a student’s knowledge of that subject. The basic tactic is to talk around a topic, throw in everything but the kitchen sink, and jumble up the whole mess with lots of hardly-relevant pictures and sidebars. (In Reform Math, jumping about from topic to topic is called “spiraling,” and it is hailed as a superior pedagogy. In practice, it engenders confusion and prevents mastery.) But never mind. The bigger goal of these books is to make students feel good about themselves. How is that possible, given that students don’t learn much? Quizzes in these books solicit opinions and feelings, not information. So students are never wrong.
Probably the single most shocking surprise in these reviews, as I quickly scanned them, was that these textbooks contain 600, 800 or even 1000 pages. For eighth-graders, in many cases. This is insane on the face of it, and obviously very expensive. The vicious irony is that half these kids are less than fluent readers. A huge book has got to be a nightmare. You could probably cut the education budget in America 10% simply by not ordering books that are excessively thick and overpriced.
Bennetta had the most reasonable expectations: textbooks should be accurate; clear; well-organized; and they had to work in the typical classroom. Fat chance. An Education Establishment that embraced Whole Word and Reform Math was not likely to tolerate biology books that actually taught biology. What a dreary predictable scandal our elite educators are.
Bennetta summed up for me his two decades as a textbook critic: “I found that more than 95% of these books were completely unacceptable. Disjointed. Silly. The whole system is corrupt at all levels. Publishers. Schools of education. Professors who put their names on someone else’s work. Tests designed by the same people who publish the books. I ran out of steam when I started to think there’s nothing that can be done.” However, Bennetta’s site-TextbookLeague.org with 225 archived reviews-remains as a powerful witness to the decline of American textbook publishing.
Now, is there any good news? An educational landscape littered with so many useless books (and so much bad faith) creates a desperate need for improvement. Predictably, clever people are finding answers. New approaches are popping up everywhere.
Everyone has heard by now about Khan Academy, with its more than 3000 videos. This is a huge interactive website that offers almost an entire education from k-12 and beyond, especially in science and math. Public schools are using Khan Academy because the database can respond (24/7) to each student’s progress more nimbly than human teachers. Khan Academy simply ignores all the bad textbooks and starts over with new-tech solutions. But the élan vital is that Khan himself is an ernest teacher who wants children to learn as much as possible.
Knewton is also an “adaptive learning platform” but more corporate and formal. Millions of students use Knewton every day. The Education Establishment won’t budge an inch on its own, but Khan and Knewton are massive flanking attacks that might force change.
Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by the “For Dummies” concept. It first appeared in 1991; now there are more than 2,000 titles. A few may get bad reviews; but for the most part, this is a great way to attack a new subject. I suspect you could discard every book in the typical public school, replace each with the closest match from the “For Dummies” library, and achieve higher scores at far less cost. These outlaw books-shorter, plainer, with no glossy photos-are designed to teach. What a concept. That’s the essential ingredient many textbooks forget.
Another good approach is to start with the shortest presentations that are readily available: dictionaries, encyclopedias, websites like wikipedia, specialty sites, books written for children and teenagers, or books written for popular markets. Students can master the short presentation, then move up to a more complete one. Teachers could put together wonderful courses without any recourse to fat, overpriced textbooks.
A big-thinking cartoonist named Larry Gonick shows another road to educational success. He created the first installment of the Cartoon History of the Universe in 1977; it’s now a seven-volume project with 350 pages. Gonick has also created cartoon guides to Calculus, Sex, Physics, Chemistry, and much else.
An extraordinary mind who has created an extraordinary oeuvre, Gonick was an excellent student, with honors in math at Harvard. “But I was not,” he explained to me, “especially happy with the prospect of spending a lifetime in a math department. I wanted to do something to help people directly. Using comics to convey information rather than simply to satirize was very appealing. Non-fiction comics was a vacant niche seemingly tailor-made for my temperament and abilities.” Again, if you throw out all the standard tomes, and replace them with Gonick’s illustrated versions, learning would probably go up across America.
Think for a moment about YouTube, with its more then 100 million videos. Even if only 1% are educational in some sense, that’s more content than you can look at in many years. Then think about all the websites dedicated to astronomy, chemistry, biology, nature, history, languages, etc. Then add the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and the rest of educational television. Further, a whole new universe of online schools has opened up just in the last few years. In general, education is booming, if not in the traditional precincts. There is no excuse for a school to use a bad textbook.
If you insist on using a traditional textbook, consider asking homeschoolers in your area what they are using. Homeschooling requires a lot of patient hours at the kitchen table. Invariably, these at-home teachers search until they find books that work. That’s why John Saxon is so popular.
My broader thesis is that our left-leaning Education Establishment tends to embrace non-functional methods such as Whole Word and Reform Math. Collectivism appears to be more important to these ideologues than education. Our self-appointed experts seem to conspire with huge publishing companies to fill classrooms with overpriced, basically useless textbooks.
According to William Bennetta, we shouldn’t expect these people to reform. But there is no reason you can’t go around them.