While reading chapters 3 and 6 of Subjects Matter I was constantly reflecting on my own experiences
in school with textbooks in high school, and even sometimes in college. The
fact of it is that textbooks are synonymous with the word boring. Often when a
teacher told me to read a textbook, I
skimmed it to get the main idea about what was being conveyed, otherwise after
the first page of the assigned reading I would have drifted off to thinking
what I was going to eat for dinner. I agree completely with this book that
textbooks should be used as a reference with its vast information, while
articles about real world incidences should be used as the course reading. This
way students can look up concepts and see how they are applied in the real
world.
I actually have a friend that works at the Pearson office in
Boston, editing math textbooks who says that the amount of knowledge in a
textbook is completely overwhelming and could never be covered in a school
year. This is a friend who actually got his math secondary education degree. I
decided to look at Pearson’s website www.Pearson.com
and instantly was reminded that this is a corporation with one thing truly in
mind and that is money. At the top of the page, they display the share value
proudly. This makes me wonder if we should really trust corporations when it
comes to deciding what should be taught or tested, *cough* ETS *cough*. Even
upon closer examination of their website, I got to a page on education, and
there is no mission statement, just information on their success and control of
the textbook world. Are textbooks really engineered to educate, or make money
for the manufacturers?
I felt the same way when doing my textbook analysis... Less big business, more education! Although I really do like the textbook I choose (online version of The Americans, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012), their website is riddled with sales propaganda and "fluff." The prices on these "content overloaded" textbooks are to say the least, extraordinarily unaffordable. Much like most of corporate America, the profit margin of big business seems to overshadow the main purpose of the textbook... educating America's youth. In Subjects Matter Chapter 3, I was astonished when I read the following passage:
ReplyDelete“The Texas-California problem… because these two states are both lucrative textbook markets, and because they approve only a few books in each subject and then put up the money for the schools to buy them, Texas and California have a vastly disproportionate influence on what goes into all American textbooks. For the major publishers, it is simply not worth the multi-million dollar development expense for a new textbook unless you can go for adoption in Texas and California. So these two states’ standards have become our de facto national textbook standards.”
Two things really frustrated me:
1. The lack of educator input and/or involvement in the content selection of textbooks.
2. That textbook companies take the road most profitable... Create a "one size fits all" textbook to satisfy the needs of a few influential states, while in the process inundating American students with books too overloaded with information and too boring to read.