For today’s post, I intend to spend some time looking over how middle and high school textbooks have changed over the years. There was a time (long, long ago, when I was still in school…) where textbooks resources…literally compendiums of almost everything we would use for a class. Now, textbooks have increasing amounts of color, sidebars, multiple narratives, and break up any text into a myriad of smaller, disjointed pieces.
I find this rather troublesome, especially with regard to any teacher who would attempt to work on topics like reading comprehension, critical judgment issues, and even college preparation. It would seem as if the text book publishers are in fear of being taken over by comic book industry…
The world that modern students live in is quite a bit different from the world I grew up in. among many of these salient differences are actions, and entertainments that they (most teens) spend time with which would point towards so many developing problems with attention span. With this happening in our society, instead of trying to deal with this change in behavior, we (educators), and textbook publishers (along with all sorts of ancillary groups) seem to have decided that it is easier to just go with the flow.
It isn’t that modern textbooks are ‘dumbed down’, at least if you are talking about the information held therein. But if you look at how the information is presented, one could easily see that there could be a whiff of pandering to these lowering expectations…
When I was in college, as a matter of fact, every time I have been in college, I have seen and heard college instructors, associate professors, department heads, and almost anyone actively engaged in teaching at that level mention (from subtle allusions to harangues)how poorly most students are prepared for college.
Some of the lost skills which they would decry amounted to only a few topics: note taking and learning how to summarize, ability to read (at a high school level!) as well as the more complex ability to read critically… One quick look at the textbooks in most middle and high schools these days would certainly allow you to see why this is still a problem (since I was in college, and it likely predates even this nearly prehistoric date!).
I haven’t seen much difference in how most college classes are taught, so, one could then assume that this might be a more objective means to evaluate how well our educations institutions are doing (K-12) than any of the more notable means of evaluating student performance (i.e. standardized tests, SAT’s, etc.).
Surprisingly enough, I haven’t seen or heard anything related to this being used as one of a number of manes to accomplish this important assessment of how our schools are doing. I mentioned in a previous post about how the theory (sic) of multiple intelligences is proselytized (at least in) the teachers college I went to. If colleges don’t make these sorts of allowances, or adaptations … what is the purpose of spending any time with this idea?
This is the same sort of question I have with regard to how school textbooks present information. These more modern ‘lite’ methods of transmitting information to our students would seem to me to be much more of a problem that whether Texas deems that excluding some mention of Thomas Jefferson as an advocate of separation of church and state. Any teacher can spend about 10 minutes online to find a flood in information to use in any kind of a presentation of this topic. Nonetheless, this topic has been lurking in the news for the last several weeks.
The conspiracy buff in me would love to see this as a red herring to cover for the fact that textbook publishers are far more worried about things like the Apple iPad as a replacement for these 10 pound behemoth textbooks. I would just like to see them cut down to far cheaper paperbacks with far fewer illustrations. Any student can find much better visual information on the internet that is in any modern textbook…so why are we still acting as if the textbooks are the only source of information for the students?
