Seth Godin rants against textbooks today. He writes about looking at a marketing textbook, which, despite a 2009 publication date, lacks mention of Google and Twitter. He writes about the rising cost of education and the system stealing money from deserving students. Tsk tsk.
The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it’s part of their job, remember?) When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website (or even in a looseleaf notebook) and there, you’re done. You just saved your intro marketing class about $15,000. Every semester. Any professor of intro marketing who is assigning a basic old-school textbook is guilty of theft or laziness.
Textbooks are not worthwhile anymore, Seth writes, and ought to be killed.
These kids would agree:
I recall the spring of 2006 when professor Doug Snow instructed me and my graduate school peers on quantitative analysis. The accelerated class–which normally met over 14 weeks–was condensed to nine Saturdays, four hours every morning. My friends thought I was crazy for enrolling.
While many graduate school courses were full of the fodder that Seth illustrates, Doug made data analysis fun and interesting. With the caveat that I’ve never been a math geek, I enjoyed learning about probability and normal distributions, calculating chi squares, and interpreting bivariate regression results.
A primary reason why I enjoyed the material so much was because on the first day, Doug told us we were expected to bring calculators to class, and to use them when solving problems. He said every homework assignment and in-class exam would be “open book.”
We had a textbook for the class, but my professor did not want us to memorize anything. I remember Doug saying that in the “real world” (and my peers and I all worked there, 40+ hours a week) people are not expected to memorize, but to look up information in books and online. He expected no less from us in class. He’d grade us on how we analyzed and interpreted the data. I got an “A” in the class.
Most of my other grad school classes were not taught in the same manner. Most of my other professors were not as progressive-minded. And from cursory knowledge from friends in other grad school programs at other schools, most classes were not taught the way Doug taught us: challenging the educational status quo by asking us not to memorize.
The system is slowly changing, thankfully. Among a series of educational videos I shared earlier this spring, such the one above, I’d like to include one more on rewriting the rules:
Textbooks may be worthwhile, but not the way we view them today. If the definition of a textbook is a compendium of words and ideas, why can’t the textbook exist in portable media that’s friendlier to the Earth and costs a fraction of the price?
Eliminate the memorization, too. That won’t challenge anyone’s mind.
Related posts:
- How Students Learn Democracy Online
- Stop Spinning Business and Government
- Teachers Beware: Facebook May Cause Firing
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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What about students who don’t have an iPhone, a computer, or even a calculator? Plus, we already are raising a generation that can’t tell time without a digital display, who can’t make change without a cash register telling them what the change is and who can only relate in 140 characters or fewer – it all sounds like laziness of mind to me, not the opposite. There are times when you can look something up and there are times when you have to rely on your memory – oh dear, I forgot about pulling out your mobile device at inappropriate times to look something up. Why bother with a formal education system at all?
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Textbooks have the same freight train heading towards them that the newspaper industry has been run over by. The business model and technique of teaching is going to change, just a question of who the new leaders will be.
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Spot on post Ari! I’m the kind of person who needs this style of learning anyway, and often gave significant credence to the thought of quitting college during undergrad because school was so painful for me. It’s amazing how slow adoption rates are on ideas like this, and I hope to god that we make these changes in a widespread manner by the time my children are in school.
On a side note: I was tempted to use the Facebook comments, until I realized there’s no meta data giving credit to me, my site, or my Twitter handle. Take about room for improvement!
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