Hmm. Well, in a way I see what you mean, pslively, but Textbooks Are Not Evil. Textbooks are a tool. In a great many situations, textbooks are not the best available tool. In many cases, living books are. But textbooks ARE sometimes the very best option. In fact, in some areas, there really ISN’T a sensible other option and there is nothing wrong with using them. I really hate to see the attitude that textbooks are always bad, because you are eventually going to find out that you will need them. One can study a “living” subject and still use texts. It’s OK. CHARLOTTE USED TEXTBOOKS. Not all the time, assuredly, and it depended greatly on the age of the students and upon the subject being studied, but she did not believe all textbooks were The Devil. There are just some subjects that lend themselves poorly to any other sort of thing, since the subjects are fact-dense. We were talking here this weekend–it’s really the case. You just CAN’T put all the data, facts and concepts needed to study an upper-level lab science course in a “story”. You can try to find the best-written materials you can, you can use various other options as aids and as high-interest assistance and try to use imaginative ways to explain ideas, but at the very, very bottom, you just are not going to have a “living book” that teaches you all of, say, laboratory calculus-based physics. It’d have to be six thousand pages long to get everything into some kind of story. And it’d most likely be ridiculous. You need the facts, clearly explained. I actually have lots of what I do consider living physics books–we love them! But they do not convey everything we need to know.
All kids might very well NOT love Fred. My oldest kid would have HATED it. Why put math in a story? He did math to get AWAY from stories. This is a kid who, when asked to do a nature notebook entry on the wildflowers by the side of our road, painstakingly measured all the petals, leaves, and stems and made a table. This would not be a kid who wanted to learn fractions by a story. 🙂 All our options in materials are just tools. Textbooks are tools, sometimes very useful ones. Living books are tools, lovely ones which bring delight to us all (or most of us, anyway.) We should know when to use each tool. There is no shame nor harm nor foul in using a text for a subject that works well as a text. We should all be looking at our kids, their learning styles and ages, the subject matter, and take a “long view” of the entire educational process, and then select the best tools and materials. Six year old learning about butterflies? Find a living book. Nine year old learning about George Washington? Find a living book. Fourteen year old doing proofs? Maybe a text, maybe a combination of text and story-line book or other methods of explaining. Sixteen year old doing differential equations? Have a hard time seeing how that’s going to happen without a text of some sort, or something based on a text (lecture, etc.) and it’s going to take some practice. Probably a lot of practice. Supplementing with different ideas to explain when necessary is GREAT. Depending only on story-like explanations? Maybe not always a good idea.
Very few of the parents on my college-bound email group use ONLY LoF. Although a good number use it to supplement. For many kids there it’s been just what they needed to understand. I’ve heard of many others who really just want a nice text. 🙂 I enjoyed my look at the LoF statistics book, but I did not buy it. We’ll be getting a text, possibly supplemented by video instruction somewhere. It’s the most sensible option for my sixteen year old who is headed for college soon, where he will NOT be receiving all his instruction via living books.
We don’t need to fear textbooks or avoid them completely or replace them utterly. We simply need practical knowledge of when they are most appropriate and when they are not. And using them at times does not make the subject we are studying dead. It’s still a living subject. It’s OK.
