Al Gore won an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize, proving once again, that those with prestige and status usually produce the opposite of truth. Drop your carbon trading right now or sell it short. You heard it here.
This is a graphical representation of the inflation-adjusted commodity prices of 19 items from the energy, precious metals and commercial metals categories from 1934 to the present. If the world were running out of precious resources, the trend would be rising. Now that this, Global Warming and the H1N1 have proved such disappointments on the way to the Apocalypse, what will they warn us about next?
Textbook Creation–Inside the Sausage Factory
Some years ago, I signed on as an editor at a major publisher of elementary school and high school textbooks, filled with the idealistic belief that I’d be working with equally idealistic authors to create books that would excite teachers and fill young minds with Big Ideas.
Not so.
I got a hint of things to come when I overheard my boss lamenting, "The books are done and we still don’t have an author! I must sign someone today!"
Every time a friend with kids in school tells me textbooks are too generic, I think back to that moment. "Who writes these things?" people ask me. I have to tell them, without a hint of irony, "No one." It’s symptomatic of the whole muddled mess that is the $4.3 billion textbook business.
Textbooks are a core part of the curriculum, as crucial to the teacher as a blueprint is to a carpenter, so one might assume they are conceived, researched, written, and published as unique contributions to advancing knowledge.
In fact, most of these books fall far short of their important role in the educational scheme of things. They are processed into existence using the pulp of what already exists, rising like swamp things from the compost of the past. The mulch is turned and tended by many layers of editors who scrub it of anything possibly objectionable before it is fed into a government-run "adoption" system that provides mediocre material to students of all ages.
Welcome to the Machine
The first product I helped create was a basal language arts program. The word basal refers to a comprehensive package that includes students’ textbooks for a sequence of grades, plus associated teachers’ manuals and endless workbooks, tests, answer keys, transparencies, and other "ancillaries." My company had dominated this market for years, but the brass felt that our flagship program was dated. They wanted something new, built from scratch.
assessment
Sounds like a mandate for innovation, right? It wasn’t. We got all the language arts textbooks in use and went through them carefully, jotting down every topic, subtopic, skill, and subskill we could find at each grade level. We compiled these into a master list, eliminated the redundancies, and came up with the core content of our new textbook. Or, as I like to call it, the "chum."
But wait. If every publisher was going through this same process (and they were), how was ours to stand out? Time to stir in a philosophy.
By philosophy, I mean a pedagogical idea. These conceptual enthusiasms surge through the education universe in waves. Textbook editors try to see the next one coming and shape their program to embody it.
The new ideas are born at universities and wash down to publishers through research papers and conferences. Textbook editors swarm to events like the five-day International Reading Association conference to pick up the buzz. They all run around wondering, What’s the coming thing? Is it critical thinking? Metacognition? Constructivism? Project learning?
At those same conferences, senior editors look for up-and-coming academics and influential educational consultants to sign as "authors" of the textbooks that the worker bees are already putting together back at the shop.
Once a philosophy has been fixed on and added, we shape the pulp to fit key curriculum guidelines. Every state has a prescribed compendium of what kids should learn — tedious lists of bulleted objectives consisting mostly of sentences like this:
"The student shall be provided content necessary to formulate, discuss, critique, and review hypotheses, theories, laws, and principles and their strengths and weaknesses."
If you should meet a textbook editor and he or she seems eccentric (odd hair, facial tics, et cetera), it’s because this is a person who has spent hundreds of hours scrutinizing countless pages filled with such action items, trying to determine if the textbook can arguably be said to support each objective.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies
