Why Do Textbooks Get Such a Bad Rap?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder defends textbooks as valuable instructional tools that have been unfairly maligned by the education profession.
Key Takeaways
- Textbooks provide comprehensive content - They cover material systematically in a way that teacher-created materials rarely match
- The discomfort is with the content volume - Educators resist textbooks partly because they reveal how much content should be covered
- Good textbooks are good curriculum - Rather than abandoning textbooks, schools should choose better ones and use them well
Transcript
How did textbooks get such a bad rap?
I think it's a little bit undeserved, and I think textbooks are going to have a bit of a renaissance as we move away from having everything on devices.
I think people don't like textbooks because they confront you with just how much there is to learn in a given course.
And if you follow the textbook, there's no avoiding that content, right?
If you go through every chapter, you think, okay, there are a lot of concepts in this chapter.
There's a lot of content here.
And if you don't follow a textbook, it's easy to just reduce the amount of content to something that's comfortable and enjoyable for everybody.
And I remember some of my college textbooks.
I took a lot of science classes in college, zoology and botany and chemistry and biochemistry.
And like some of these textbooks are like, 500 to 1,000 pages long and some of the chapters are like, you know, 70 pages on worms.
Like there is some like frankly hard to get through stuff in a textbook and you just can't overlook it, but that's not the fault of the fact that it's a book, right?
If I was learning from an app or if I was learning from a website or if I was learning from some sort of other learning activity, like the amount of content would still be there and I think we just kind of ignore it and do a bad job of covering it all when we don't use a textbook.
I think it's not really the textbook's fault if there's a lot to learn in a subject.
And we appreciate this for math, right?
Like, we understand you're going to have to do a lot of math problems.
You're going to have to go through a lot of lessons in order to master the math in a given class.
But I think we want there to be some sort of shortcut around that in other subjects.
So that's why we don't like textbooks.
And we think, oh, if only there were some other technique that would be less soul-sucking, you know, maybe we could get through the content easier.
But I think we've got to get back to content.
We've got to not downplay the content.
We've got to not pretend that there's some sort of just like one weird trick, skill, or activity that we can do to magically give kids what they need and bypass the content.
So let me know what you think is happening with textbooks and if they deserve the reputation they have.