Let’s say a wealthy person funds the creation of the best math, science, history and English textbooks ever made. They are the best researched, best written, and most clearly explained textbooks ever created within their subject areas. They are virtual works of educational art. He creates enough books in these categories to cover 1st grade through 12th grade.
Then he gives the content away. The books are available free for download or viewing via a website he creates. He sets aside enough funds to keep the materials updated as needed for 30 years.
Do these textbooks conform to the education standards of different states?
There are a lot of loopholes to go through, but if they follow the technical specifications for different states I don’t see why they wouldn’t be used. In any case, I think most high schools use supplemental textbooks, and they certainly could be brought in like that.
That said, as a teacher I don’t think there is such thing as one perfect textbook. Different schools, classes, and teachers call for different things. Teaching is an art, not a science, and since the variables are people it is going to be hard to ever get a perfect system down. At best a textbook is a frame that you hang instruction on, or a tool that can help prepare students for the actual teaching. So a more perfect textbook is not going to make a huge difference.
Is this guy also going to pay for the technology to be able to read these textbooks? It doesn’t matter how good they are, if they’re not accessible, there’s no point to it. He can buy Kindles and do it that way, which will also allow teachers to use them for other books.
Although the liklihood of a textbook meeting the requirements of all Schools Boards in the USA, I think the logistics of accessing the books is the real block.
I don’t know whether any schools have moved to paperless teaching materials, but the costs of providing reading devices to all children from Grades 1-12 are enourmous. And there’s still a social transition required to get people used to reading exclusively from a screen - I can’t imagine reading bedtime stories on a kindle, but I know many schools now use interactive whiteboards which can replace individual textbooks in many cases.
My daughter in middle school doesn’t have a hard copy of her science textbook. The publishing company has put it on a web page and they log in to use it. During class, it’s displayed the smartboard. If there was a free version that covered the curriculum, I’m sure the school would be happy to use that instead.
You couldn’t get 10 teachers to agree on the best textbook for any subject, let alone a nation of teachers.
And even so, it might work with science and math, but it’d never work with English and history. The former because school boards across the nation have widely different standards for what is considered appropriate reading material for their children. The latter because most schools incorporate local and state history into their history classes to make it more relevant.
Here’s an article about two philanthropists, Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy, who are doing essentially what you proposed (although I have no idea if they’re the “best” textbooks). The books are available online for free, or the student can pay for a bound printed copy.
There are some fundemental problems with this plan that have nothing to do with school curriculums or state standards.
In order to get the “best researched, best written, and most clearly explained textbooks ever created within their subject areas” for something like History, you’ll need to make it 500,000 pages long pulling in archival research, document analysis and firsthand commentary to bring about a cohesive narrative that analyzes events in a logical fashion from multiple viewpoints. It would be daunting enough for a 12th grader faced with a book bigger than his locker, but completely beyond the scope of a 9th grader, let alone a 1st grader. So you’re left with needing to “dumb down” the text by saying things like “the Pilgrims and the Indians had Thanksgiving together!” because a full explanation would be beyond the grasp of many groups of children.
So at any level, as you start to simplify the text, you bring about editorial decisions on what’s important and what needs to be modified or edited out completely. Those choices are inherently a bias from the writers and the editors on what goes and what stays. That happens ALL THE TIME with the textbooks we have now and your hypothetical textbook won’t be any different.
Here’s the real key to solving this problem: question the text. Students are given one textbook and told this is the text in which they will learn the facts they need to learn and then given a test to gauge their knowledge on learning the facts as presented in those books. At no point do the kids learn that maybe, just maybe, there are alternate viewpoints, alternate theories, or that gasp the actual text is wrong!
Everything and everyone has a bias. To be a good student you need to accept the text for what it is: a starting point.
To do that, though, you’ll have to fundementally change how students learn in the classroom and that goes way beyond any textbook.
I have no idea if this is universal, but when I went through teachers’ training school (although I very soon dropped out of teaching) our teachers more often than not used textbooks they had written themselves, which means that we became familiar with the material and supposedly would buy the stuff when we got into the position of being responsible of acquiring things. No doubt teachers at other colleges did the same thing.
:rolleyes: