The cur­ricu­lum con­tro­versy in the state of Texas has drawn the atten­tion of  media and polit­i­cal cir­cles around the coun­try.  Major net­works includ­ing CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are fol­low­ing the jour­ney of the Texas school sys­tem as they attempt to adopt a new cur­ricu­lum.  The process became highly politi­cized when ten Repub­li­can com­mit­tee mem­bers sup­ported the changes and five Democ­rats opposed them.  Texas greatly influ­ences the mate­r­ial that text­book com­pa­nies include in the books they pub­lish. These books are used nation­wide by mil­lions of stu­dents.  (Unfor­tu­nately, my fine home state of Iowa does not have enough pur­chas­ing power to dic­tate to pub­lish­ers what they incor­po­rate into their text­books.) Before you read on, I have three con­fes­sions to make:

1.    I haven’t stud­ied the pro­posed changes in depth, but I have skimmed them and read var­i­ous viewpoints.

2.    I think some of the changes that I have read about are stupid.

3.    The remain­der of this post will NOT focus on those changes.

As I have lis­tened and read about this debate, I have tried to ana­lyze what has caused this topic to become so heated.  It seems that there are two sides who adamantly dis­agree about cer­tain com­po­nents and lan­guage of the cur­ricu­lum.  They have dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives about many of the same events, and the impor­tance of those events.  Hmmmm…..different per­spec­tives about the same issues, but yet the text­book can’t or won’t include mul­ti­ple perspectives. 

This entire topic brings me to some recent con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had with one to one edu­ca­tors about text­books, or the lack of text­books.  Some one to one schools have elim­i­nated text­books, and oth­ers are soon to make the move.  As a for­mer social stud­ies teacher, I real­ize how scary this would be.  I remem­ber how excited I was the sum­mer before my first job when I got my teach­ing man­u­als.  It felt like I finally had some idea what I was going to teach!

Do text­books still have the value they did five, ten, or fif­teen years ago? 
This Texas debate reaf­firms my belief that most text­books should become as obso­lete as the film pro­jec­tor.  Any piece of infor­ma­tion that can be found in a text­book can be found online in mul­ti­ple places.  Online resources will also pro­vide numer­ous per­spec­tives and infor­ma­tion in mul­ti­ple forms of media.  This also means that schools will need to spend some time on digital/information lit­er­acy.  Lessons about how the same news event can be viewed com­pletely dif­fer­ently from two major net­works such as FOX and MSNBC is just one exam­ple of dig­i­tal lit­er­acy.  Using online resources also pro­vides an oppor­tu­nity for stu­dents to eval­u­ate and ana­lyze in ways that are dif­fi­cult with only a text­book.  Find­ing infor­ma­tion and resources will not be dif­fi­cult at all, but eval­u­at­ing the resources will be.
Yes, this will take some time, but it seems well worth it to me. It would be amaz­ing to have stu­dents who truly stud­ied, ana­lyzed, and eval­u­ated events as opposed to receiv­ing the infor­ma­tion from one source.  A start­ing point may be for edu­ca­tors to use text­books as a sup­ple­men­tal mate­r­ial to online resources as opposed to the cur­rent sta­tus, which is the opposite.