Ah, the Compton’s! My folks had one from 1970, maybe, but every year we got the yearly update. A book usually more than an inch thick, with updates on all kinds of stuff. I loved that book, spent hours looking through that book. Only occasionally actually pulling out the original encyclopedia book for reference.
We also had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica from the 50’s. I actually did compare them at times.
Yeah, graduated high school in 1981.
I love old magazines, and collect old medical books. They are rare, to varying degrees, precisely because people discarded them due to them being obsolete. The same thing is true for other ephemera created today.
There was also a set of Grimms’ Fairy Tales on the shelf, the original versions, circa 1930.
I was a lucky kid.
A 1982 set of EB is going to be useless for 3rd grade.
Not many graphics and a dense text loaded with big
words. Britannica Junior and World Book of any vintage
would be worth keeping for primary schoolers.
I am appalled that so many replies are ignorant of the
level of education required to comprehend Encyclopedia
Britannica. My dad was a 1950’s salesman for both EB
(a limited market) and World Book (high demand) at
different times. When he was promoted to district sales
manager, we received an expenses paid visit to a
Field Enterprises convention in Chicago. In my dotage
I have sets of EB(1997) and World Book (2003) that were
tossed out by the “Friends of the Houston Public Library.”
I’d pitch them, especially since that was less of a “donation” and more of a “here, you throw this away.”
I’m surprised at the volume of “get rid of 'em” votes. Sure, they’re out of date. And sure, they may report things which happened before 1982 inaccurately. For example, in 1982 we didn’t know there were humans in Australia 60,000 years ago.
We didn’t know about germ theory in the 1400s, either, but that doesn’t mean we throw out any scientific texts from before that. The books are interesting, and as long as you explain that stuff in them will be wrong, they will by useful.
I don’t see why you would get rid of them unless shelf space is at a premium.
I was able to read and comprehend most BE articles without difficulty when I was about six.
For those who keep saying, “But they might be interesting! I love looking at stuff like this!”, would YOU be willing to take them off of his hands?
You can either lower the bar or raise it. Most of the kids in my class could read in the 1st grade. By the 3rd grade the expectation was to challenge yourself with “big words”. That’s what dictionaries were for. An encyclopedia was a window to the world that existed nowhere else. It was an education unto itself.
But then, we could make change in the 3rd grade so I guess it’s time to lower the bar yet again.
Absolutely, provided they’re in good condition. My wife might disagree. Though in fairness, 1982 was the year I was born so I suppose I have some additional vanity-related interest.
Sure, but you don’t use them to teach school children either. They may have limited use as curios or some minor historical value but they’re not especially useful in an academic setting like a classroom. For that matter, the information in them may be useful but said information is very likely stored elsewhere (like say, in the Encyclopedia Brittanica home offices) for future generations to read about 1982 thoughts regarding weevils and Sierra Leone so there’s no real “We have to save the physical books for people a hundred years from now” impetus either.
They may be useful for a “This is how the world used to be pre-internet” lesson where you explain them, let the kids each pick a volume to thumb through for a little while and then send them off to become mulch.
I say toss 'em. Teaching children how their grandparents did research might be fun, depending on how it’s taught, but what would be the point? How my grandparents did research was a lot less efficient than Google, so knowing how to do it slowly is not much advantage over teaching how to do it in the 21st century.
Rather than comparing old encyclopedia articles to see what’s changed, spend the time learning how to determine that an Internet article is bogus or incomplete or unreliable.
“This morning, boys and girls, we are going to learn about clickbait” strikes me as more useful than “let’s see what they didn’t know about AIDS in 1982”. YMMV.
Regards,
Shodan
About the same as watching someone churn butter at Ye Olde History Towne, I imagine.
Update: I just found out that they’re in my room because a fellow teacher happily accepted the donation from a parent, and they were put in the hallway between our rooms, and presumably a custodian moved them into my room. Now that I know that, guess whose room I just moved them into?
Problem:solved.
Unless you’re planning a specific lesson plan around historic changes between then and now, I think they could best be used for cut-out collages or making papier-mache.
As books in a classroom or school library, I honestly think they’re less than useless. They’re taking up finite shelf space and making extra work for the library staff* while missing the last 35 years of information and containing much that is just not accurate any more.
*I used to work on a team handling donated books for a university archaeology library. Even just dealing with a limited field range, and donations mainly from dead or elderly professors, sorting and evaluating all the books still took several dedicated staff barely keeping up with the inflow, and most of it ended up junked anyway because the library already had copies in better condition.
See? Aren’t you glad you didn’t pitch them in the trash?
The lesson here is to never throw away anything ever. Not because of any perceived “value” but because it might belong to someone else on accident.
Old periodicals are a different matter from encyclopedias, as they are meant to be a snapshot of contemporary articles on their particular subject matter, rather than compilations of “everything we know” that will be regularly reprinted and updated. The contents of a periodical from 1920 to 1923 will be completely different from those of 1924-1926, while encyclopedias will be only marginally different from year to year. Most libraries will look for old periodicals, although it’s likely that they’ll already have things from 1982 and are increasingly going over to photographed or online archives (binding, de-fungus-ing and restoring are slow and expensive processes!)
Exactly what I was going to suggest. A complete set of Britannicas (or any old general encyclopedia) would be a gold mine of collage material imagery and random text paragraphs.
I’d keep it. “Look, children. These books are 35 years old, and you can still learn a whole lot of basic knowledge from them. To get updated knowledge, just read the newspaper or google it. That gadget you’re playing with will be useless in a year’s time.”
Do 3rd graders even do research? I remember writing narrative stories and writing about books, but I think wasn’t until around 5th grade when we were expected to do any sort of research on a topic.
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Really? I remember researching in third grade (on African animals, and my teacher was an idiot, so she vetoed my request to research moundbuilder termites on the grounds that they weren’t an animal, but no, I’m not still bitter). Next week we’re hitting the ground running with research: we have a container garden to plant, and I’m gonna let kids decide what they want to plant through a combination of researching different possibilities and classroom consensus-building.
We’re not talking about research papers with MLA footnotes or anything, but sure, kids start researching real young.