laura.fo

While I was visiting my mother last December I was going through old things in her basement and I found the English textbook I used as a sophomore in Germany. I remember going back to my regular (American) high school the following year and being told, by my principal, that I wouldn't get credit for that class because it wasn't a "real" English class, it was English as a Foreign Language. "But it was harder than my English classes here," I protested. It just popped out; I didn't mean to be insulting. He sneered. But it was true.

I was showing the book to my daughter tonight, and she commented on its size. It's small. All my German textbooks were. My cousin, who grew up in Germany and now teaches in the United States, has said that the first thing she would do, if she were to reform American education, would be to get rid of the monster-truck-sized textbooks and replace them with shorter, more challenging books like they use in Germany. Then she'd devote more classtime to conversations. That's something else I remember from my German high school — how little lecturing there was, and how much discussion.

I was thinking of this tonight because I was reading this piece by Tamim Ansary, a former textbook editor. In it he talks about the politics of textbook development, which is done by committee and carefully avoids controversy, leaving students with the heaving books we remember so well, the ones that somehow manage to take genuinely interesting subjects (revolution! pirates! the plague!) and make them god-awful boring. He also talks about the role of Texas in influencing curriculum content, which means whatever their local school boards are doing is likely to trickle down into classes throughout the country.