Dork-ography

So now that I've got all this free time on my hands, I finally finished the Thomas B. Ford Foundation white paper on the textbook adoption process (link's below). After having read the assessment they delivered, I decided to do a little research.

Working in the industry as I do, I have ready access to about 20 years' worth of textbooks, so I took a stroll down to the company library and started picking a few books out at random. We have books from every program of every major publisher in the country and it didn't take too long before I came to one sad conclusion:

Modern textbooks are just about unreadable.

Sure, they're incredibly visually appealing, full of interesting photographs and pretty colors. But as is often the case in the modern age, appearance has overcome content. To steal a phrase, "there's no there there." The text flits about from topic to topic, as if looking for maximum density of ideas and minimum density of context. Facts are dropped like breadcrumbs, but they never lead to anything.

When I was a kid, I remember sitting and reading my 8th-grade American history book for the fun of it. It was visually bland – just words and an occasional black and white picture tucked in a corner (where pictures belong, in any decently designed book) – but it was interesting. The writing was captivating and presented historical figures like George Washington and Booker T. Washington as people who would actually be cool to know. I'm sure that it might have been a little slanted toward the "dead white male" point of view, but it was a real live book with real live stories to tell. The fact that those stories were history was almost incidental.

Of course, I also used to read the encyclopedia for fun, so it might just be me.