A couple of months ago, the daughter of a friend of my brother and sister-in-law wandered into their home office and saw the poster for the History of the Ancient World on their wall. “Hey, we use that book at our school!” she said.

Heather said, “Oh, yeah, my sister-in-law wrote it.”

“I love that book!” she said. She is clearly a girl of great taste and intelligence.

So she and her mother (here they are)–

talked to her history teacher, and on this trip to Seattle her teacher invited me to come speak to his ninth-grade history class.

This was a first for me. I don’t generally find myself lecturing ninth-graders (apart from my own). But they were charming and interested, and told me how much they liked the book and how it was so much better than a standard textbook, and asked lots of questions about how you write a history of the world.

Like, “How do you decide where to start?” (Answer: You pick a starting point, write fifty pages, throw them away and start at a better place.)

And, “Are you going to finish the books on time?” (Answer: Er, no, not even close.)

And, “Now that you’ve done the first two books, is it getting easier?” (Answer: No, I reinvent the wheel every single blasted time; the only difference is that now I can say to myself, I’ve done it twice, it will probably come together one more time.)

And, “Do you edit your rough drafts?” (Answer: Well, the original drafts of both books came out to around 900,000 words each, and the final drafts clocked in at 250,000, so that should speak for itself. Someday I will seriously publish The History of the World: The Director’s Cut. Not that anyone will read it.)

This was fun. I talk about history a lot, but I don’t talk about writing it very often, and I enjoyed myself. And afterwards they wanted me to sign books.

I LOVE having teenage fans. And it’s not a given, when you write political history about people named Meskiaggasher and Adjib and Yi.

Thoughts, any of you?

A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong with Education

A former schoolbook editor parses the politics of educational publishing.
by Tamim Ansary

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.

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.

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-based 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.

Of course, no one looks at all the state frameworks. Arizona’s guidelines? Frankly, my dear, we don’t give a damn. Rhode Island’s? Pardon me while I die laughing. Some states are definitely more important than others. More on this later.

Eventually, at each grade level, the editors distill their notes into detailed outlines, a task roughly comparable to what sixth-century jurists in Byzantium must have faced when they carved Justinian’s Code out of the jungle of Roman law. Finally, they divide the outline into theoretically manageable parts and assign these to writers to flesh into sentences.

What comes back isn’t even close to being the book. The first project I worked on was at this stage when I arrived. My assignment was to reduce a stack of pages 17 inches high, supplied by 40 writers, to a 3-inch stack that would sound as if it had all come from one source. The original text was just ore. A few of the original words survived, I suppose, but no whole sentences.

To avoid the unwelcome appearance of originality at this stage, editors send their writers voluminous guidelines. I am one of these writers, and this summer I wrote a ten-page story for a reading program. The guideline for the assignment, delivered to me in a three-ring binder, was 300 pages long….

You can read the rest, should you be so inclined, at edutopia.org.

If you teach your kids at home (either full-time, or after their classroom education)…what would you like to see at your local bookstore that would help make your job easier?

Educator discount, support group, new shelf organization, particular titles…? I have a few ideas on this but I’m curious to see what you all think.