Reply to Why oh why don't schools use textbooks anymore??

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It is very out of vogue to use a textbook, especially in history. I use a textbook and assign class work and homework in it. It isn’t all we do, but I agree that textbooks are good as foundations + structure + review.[/quote]

Well, 30 years ago, when I went to high school in a big urban school system, my US history textbook only ran to the end of the Johnson administration (this was in 1990 so, some stuff happened!) Also, while I don’t know if this is still true, (it certainly was 10 years ago) the single biggest purchaser of textbooks for schools was Texas and because of that, they had an inordinate influence on what goes into those textbooks, especially for social studies etc, but even science (14 states have creationism alongside evolution.) Given the way things are going in Texas, and all this ridiculous posturing about not teaching white kids anything that they find upsetting (such as slavery) or wanting schools to give both sides of Nazism, I for one, prefer that we don’t tax dollars on textbooks that are best quickly outdated and at worst, due to the purchasing power of certain states, flat out propaganda.

This is an interesting recent article about how different states manage to influence the content of the textbooks they give their students: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-california-history-textbooks.html

(Also in college, where I majored in a hard science, I had to buy a lot of expensive math and science textbooks that were written by the professors teaching my courses, not necessarily the “best” textbook. And they would issue new editions that really weren’t warranted by new developments in the subject matter - I mean calculus is not really changing in two years!) [/quote]

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