Quotes About Textbooks

All the textbooks talk about avoidance as a classic hallmark of anxiety disorder. So you need a therapist who is sympathetic and understanding but will also push you to do precisely the things that scare you.

One result of the book boom was the growth of new publishers, who could use any paper they could find—they often advertised for 'free' supplies—and were not rationed to a fraction of their pre-war consumption. Lacking 'back lists' they specialised in new books and the public found it bewildering that new titles should constantly be published while textbooks and classics remained unobtainable.

T]his is how it will remain until ... literary criticism discards its sociological, religious, philosophical and other textbooks, which only help mediocrity to admire itself. Only then will you be free to say what you please. [F]or God's sake stop that irrelevant chitchat.

The textbooks are dumbed down to the where your kid sister could probably read them, and the teacher go over and over and over the same stuff anyway, drilling it into your head so that they can ask you one hundred multiple-choice questions to get it all back out of you again.

It is surprising how little page space is devoted to bugs and debugging in most introductory programming textbooks.

With exceptions so rare that it is hard to remember one, textbooks are to books as powdered food supplements are to a good, balanced meal.

Experience alone, that supreme educator of peoples, will be at pains to show us our mistake. It alone will be powerful enough to prove the necessity of replacing our odious text-books and our pitiable examinations by industrial instruction capable of inducing our young men to return to the fields, to the workshop, and to the colonial enterprise which they avoid to-day at all costs.

The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave.

The worshipful biographical vignettes of Columbus provided by most of our textbooks serve to indoctrinate students into a mindless endorsement of colonialism that is strikingly inappropriate to today's postcolonial era.

exasperate the reader as much as he does the sinners he meets on his journey through America selling textbooks. You

Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to indoctrinate blind patriotism. "Take a look in your history book, and you'll see why we should be proud" goes an anthem often sung by high school glee clubs. But we need not even look inside.

Not only do textbooks fail to blame the federal government for its opposition to the civil rights movement, many actually credit the government, almost single-handedly, for the advances made during the period.

No book can convey the depths of the black experience without including material from the oppressed group. Yet not one textbook in my original sample let African Americans speak for themselves.

When textbooks make racism invisible in American history, they obstruct our already poor ability to see it in the present.

Old myths never die—they just become embedded in the textbooks. —THOMAS BAILEY

Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to indoctrinate blind patriotism.

Everyone named in our history made a positive contribution (except John Brown, as the next chapter shows). Or as Frances FitzGerald put it when she analyzed textbooks in 1979, "In all history, there is no known case of anyone's creating a problem for anyone else.

Students exit history textbooks without having developed the ability to think coherently about social life. Even

By downplaying covert and illegal acts by the government, textbook authors narcotize students from thinking about such issues as the increasing dominance and secrecy of the executive branch. By taking the government's side, textbooks encourage students to conclude that criticism is incompatible with citizenship.

history textbooks need to disabuse students of the flat-earth myth.

repression of white ethnic groups; again, most textbooks blame the people

This is part of a pattern in our textbooks: anything bad in America history happened anonymously.

Most textbook authors protect us from a racist Lincoln. By doing so, they diminish students' capacity to recognize racism as a force in American life. For if Lincoln could be racist, then so might the rest of us be. And if Lincoln could transcend racism, as he did on occasion, then so might the rest of us.

The opposite of racism is antiracism, of course, or what we might call racial idealism or equalitarianism, and it is still not clear whether it will prevail. In this struggle, our history textbooks offer little help. Just as they underplay white racism, they also neglect racial idealism. In doing so, they deprive students of potential role models to call upon as they try to bridge the new fault lines that will spread out in the future from the great rift in our past.