Textbooks and Education

by Don Webb

You’re right about the cost of textbooks; they can be expensive. And Prof. Douglas Young is right, too; professors feel the same as students do about high costs.

In grad school, one of my professors was mortified by the price of one of the books for his course. He said he’d never expected it, and he apologized profusely. And he raised hell with the bookstore. But that book was the only one available for the purpose of the course.

Universities offer students three things: the diploma, the education, and the campus experience. Prospective students need to take all three into account when choosing where to enroll.

The “education” part can take many varied forms, such a laboratories, study abroad, internships and the like. But the lecture format is the same as it was in the Middle Ages. Today’s students may have printed texts to consult, and they don’t toss coins into a jug when they leave a lecture, but how much of a change is that?

When I saw the first Macintosh computers, back in 1985, I thought: “This revolutionizes publishing.” When I showed my colleagues in the Spanish Department how it could work, they proceeded to save a small fortune in the cost of publishing their literary journal.

And I still have a copy of a small — 46-page — textbook I made for a course in translation in 1989. No heavy theory; it was an undergraduate course, after all. Rather, it was a selection of texts for practical use in the classroom. And nothing like it existed. The price was minimal; it was the cost of having it photocopied, printed and spiral-bound.

Today, we don’t even have to print. Bewildering Stories is both a literary journal and an on-line seminar open to all, and this ongoing discussion is a part of it. Does it represent the future of education? In its own way, it has a place in it.

Today’s technology promises to have even greater effects than printing did. And the pandemic of 2020 is telling the world to get a move on; we’ve been too slow to adapt.