On February 14, in a New York Times Sunday Magazine article titled “How Christian Were the Founders?”, the question of what control people with personal agendas have over what elementary and secondary school students are taught. The article reminded me of a book I read several years ago, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch (2004), which addressed the same issue.
What bothers me most about what is happening before the Texas State Board of Education, which is the focus of both the article and the book, is that whatever decisions the TSBE make will affect the education not only of Texas students, but of students in 46 other states. I don’t care if Texas wants to dumb-down its student population, but it bothers me that it wants to drag down the rest country along with itThe problem, yet again, lies with book publishers. Because Texas has a centralized textbook purchasing procedure, it has clout in the textbook market, and publishers kowtow to its demands. Understandably from a financial perspective, publishers don’t want to be excluded from Texas’ $22 billion dollar expenditure on textbooks (some 48 million textbooks each year), but from an ethical/moral perspective, the publishers are contributing to America’s decline in exchange for the almighty dollar.
In past years the problem was nearly insolvable. But now things have changed — or they should be changing — and ebook textbooks can be the answer. With today’s technology, there is no reason why publishers can’t create a pick-and-choose menu for school districts. Instead of printing millions of textbooks and locking knowledge in shackles for the next 10 years (the lifespan of the Texas review decisions), publishers could both reduce textbook costs and allow each state and/or school district to create custom books for local courses.
If Texas and Kansas want to teach that the world is flat, while New York and California want to teach that the world is round, customized textbooks would let them do so. In the expansion of fact over fiction, ebooks can play a role in saving America from total educational collapse.
And think about how much money local school districts could save. It should be less expensive for schools to provide ebooks as course textbooks; in fact, it probably would be cost-effective for several school districts in a state to band together to build their own etextbooks than what is currently being spent on printed books that are not as focused on local needs.
The shame of the publishing industry is that it focuses intensely on profit, with lackadaisical attention paid to insuring that American students are truly well equipped to meet future challenges. Declines in academic scores illustrate the problems that publishers, by permitting themselves to be suborned by agenda-driven groups, are perpetuating and making worse. Publishers should exercise an ethical judgment and refuse to continue down that path.
eTextbooks will make it easy to break the stranglehold pressure groups exert over the textbook market. the questions are: Will textbook publishers go the etextbook route or stick with print? Will schools adopt etextbooks?
Actually, if I were younger I think I would consider entering the etextbook creation market. This is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to break the grip of the major coursebook publishers. And California seems intent on helping with its open source textbook plan. If more states followed California’s example and moved to open source etextbooks, we might see a smartening up rather than a dumbing down of students because there would be no reason why etextbooks couldn’t be customized not only for the local school district, but for the individual classroom or even the individual student.
Perhaps the future of education isn’t as bleak as it appears today. Perhaps the future will include enhanced, customized instruction that enables each student in a classroom to learn at his or her own pace and depth. But most important, perhaps the etextbook world of the future will prevent a whole nation from succumbing to the agenda of a few who would reverse the course of knowledge, taking us back to a medieval time. Certainly, as Macmillan is demonstrating with its DynamicBooks at the college level, the technology is available; now there only needs to be the will.
Editor’s Note: Rich Adin is an editor and owner of Freelance Editorial Services, a provider of editorial and production services to publishers and authors. This is reprinted, with permission, from his An American Editor blog. PB
I almost hate to say it… but the reality of the digital text revolution may also mean the end of state control over textbooks. There is more of a need to standardize basic education nationwide, as educational quality discrepancies from state to state and region to region become more pronounced and problematic.
That could lead to a federal control over primary school textbooks for all states (and probably leaving it up to state secondary schools to “customize” that education for their citizens, if they can afford it).
So the impact of larger states like Texas and California may not be the case, once e-texts are common.
The California example could be the real renaissance for this issue. Requiring all textbooks to be in ebook form, and then working on making those cheaper and MORE current points the way to a terrific future.
I totally agree that there is TONS of money in this for publishers and ebook vendors.
Texas and Califonia have always driven the content of textboks, since they are such large buyers of them. The textbook makers gear their textbooks for selling in these states and have for decades. That was a big part of the whole language mess years ago in education. Califonia was pro whole language and the rest of the country got dragged down with them. I think it will be many years before we see e text books in the schools. I can see if happening in high school and middle school at some point, but not at the elementary level.
Balkanization of textbooks would be an Extremely Bad Thing. It would lead to increased divisions over what, exactly, the basic facts of our world actually are, and this would do no-one any good at all.
@gayle: The future costs of textbooks, and the fact that e-texts do not have the same item-by-item cost breakdowns, will likely take away the “influence” of large markets like Texas and California that were based on high volume print sales.
@Cerebus: I agree that standardization is best for the country, at least at a primary school level. After that (college and on), students can pick and choose their school according to their desires, and locally-selective e-texts can accommodate that.