The U.S. textbooks are so much better than textbooks in many other countries. They are thick and heavy, but then that is because they tend to explain the same concept in multiple different ways so students with different thinking modes can find their own explanation that clicks.

Furthermore, having good textbooks papers over the fact that in the U.S. the qualification and ability of teachers vary so much across poorer and richer school districts. A smart student in a poor school district can use the textbooks to a greater advantage.

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59percentmore 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When you get new textbooks. You still have the "new books every year or so" vs "we finally got hand-me-downs from our neighbor district after 10 years" divide.

I'd also push back against the idea that district wealth necessarily determines instructor quality. There's a lot that goes into surviving a wealthier area, and it isn't necessarily a matter of skill or experience. How well you navigate the interpersonal gamut also plays in (e.g., are you willing to compromise your ethics to keep happy the over-involved parents who care more about the grade than academic progress?).

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dfdydx 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Coming from somewhere else, US textbooks feel super watery - low signal to noise ratio, too much hand holding.

	▲	lo_zamoyski an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I would tend to agree with this. A combination between low-info fluff and childish presentation. It feels like being bombarded with a technicolor fireworks display of obfuscation and mystification. Maybe it's the gimmick of "edutainment" and the goofy idea that you need to inject fanfare and folderol into education to appeal to students that created this mess. If you look at older textbooks, before education publishing became the extortionist big business it is today (like, say, Pauling's book on general chemistry[0] - which you can still get from Dover - to name one), you will find many that are lucid and intellectually satisfying. Heck, look at scholastic pedagogic texts (like the Summa[1]) and you can follow exactly what's being said. Even if you don't grasp something, or grasp it correctly, it isn't because the writing or presentation are shit. It's because you need to keep going, but you know how to keep going. You have handles on the content and not just some huge, impenetrable, and slippery orb looming over you. It's eye-opening, because our entire media regime, and the sensibilities it entrenches, seems to suggest that education used to be dull, mindless, and joyless before the great "progressive" innovators blessed us with their wisdom, forgetting the origins of the artes liberales and some of the 19th and 20th century turns[2] that did actually debase education into something vulgar by comparison, something convenient for industry and the state. [0] https://archive.org/details/generalchemistry00paulrich [1] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Q1 [2] I am not claiming everything was perfect centuries ago, or that there were no good pedagogical developments since then.

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eigencoder 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Back when they had textbooks. Increasingly the curriculum is online and restricts exploration

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kccqzy 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Textbooks don’t need a lot of revisions though. Basic math has not really changed that much. One of my favorite textbooks I used as a kid was written ten years before I was born.

	▲	wombatpm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		When I started Chemistry in college, Professor Zumdahl said to by a copy of the CRC Press Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Whether it was new or used didn’t really matter - it’s not like Boltzmann’s constant is changing all that often.