Re: copying, learning, and teaching

Timothy Koschmann (tdk who-is-at cs.colorado.edu)
Sun, 21 Sep 1997 09:36:24 -0600

Jay Lemke wrote:
>I hope nobody would _want_ to copy chapters from _textbooks_! The whole
>point of recommending that students obtain copies of various articles and
>chapters is to avoid having to use textbooks and being able to rely on
>'primary' scholarship. Except in the natural sciences below the advanced
>graduate level, textbooks seem to me to be uniformly inferior. They give
>too single a viewpoint, they interpret complex theorists rather than
>letting them speak for themselves, their discourse is too monological, and
>they do not prepare students for the analytical and discipline-specific
>interpretive skills they need in the field. I exempt of course 'textbooks'
>that really are books of collected classic texts in a field. They perform a
>great service. Otherwise textbooks in the human sciences seem to me to
>thrive merely because they are convenient and easy to digest and test. In
>my own undergraduate education, outside of mathematics and natural science,
>I never read a single textbook.

My, my, Jay. First the publishers and now the textbook authors---you seem
to be on a mission this week to tweak everyone's nose!

WRT to your critique of textbooks, I think you are being a little too
harsh. Textbooks are useful for precisely the reasons that you decry
them---they represent an attempt to make coherent a particular area of
study. If I need to quickly develop some background in an area in which I
have no expertise, I am quite happy to pick up a textbook as a starting
point for my studies, assuming one exists. I am usually very grateful that
someone has taken the trouble to attempt to organize the information and
provide me with pointers to where I can learn more, particularly if it is
someone who has thought long and hard about how to impose that organization
on an unruly body of work. No, the problem, as I see it, is not with
textbooks per sais, but rather the stance that one takes with respect to
what one reads there. It is only a problem if you take the sophmoric
stance that you know something having read a textbook account. As long as
you recognize that what you are reading is just one person's take, not
absolute truth; I don't see why reading textbooks couldn't contribute to
the development of "analytical and discipline-specific interpretive skills."
---Tim