When are Books Better, and When are They Not?

August 11, 2009 · Filed under Literature, Unschooling · Tagged Literature, Popular Culture, Unschooling

A recent New York Times article discusses how textbooks may be going the way of the record player and the land line phone. Writer Tamar Lewin quotes the chief technology officer for a Louisiana school system (Gee, my school, didn’t have a “chief technology officer.” Oh wait! We did! But we called him the AV guy.) as saying that high school kids today are “digitally nimble” and “don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear, and rote.”

The new trend is toward web sites, online courses, and even blogs as materials to replace textbooks in some high school classrooms.

A school superintendent is quoted as saying, ” . . . we need to get out of that [brick-and-mortar] framework to having 200 or 300 kids taking courses online, at night, . . .”

The article goes into much more detail about all of this, and all of the issues it brings up, such as:

• how to deal with students who don’t have computers at home
• how textbook companies will react to this shift away from their dinosauric product
• how school systems will create, verify, and standardize curricula that include such sometimes transient sources as web sites

But, I like the idea that schools are thinking about the fact that their customers (students) are much more comfortable with a keyboard than with a book. For better or ill, today’s teens have grown up in a fast-paced society, and even the newer-style non-fiction children’s books that I find too busy and info-packed are probably too slow-moving for them.

So, I say “Way to go! Bring on the high-school ditigal revolution!”

But —

when it comes to the little ones, I say “Please give them books.” Little ones are able to concentrate intensely. They are tactile. They can focus on an image and draw countless bits of meaning from it. They can memorize text without realizing they are memorizing it — if it is pleasing to their ears and is read again and again by a loving voice.

Among the “textbooks” I recommend for the little ones:

• the “If You . . .” series from Scholastic books. You know the ones; I believe the first one my daughter devoured was If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620. My personal favorite is If You Lived 100 Years Ago.

• the Jean Fritz history books, such as What’s the Big Idea, Ben Franklin?.

• the Picture-Book Biography series. We loved A Picture Book of Helen Keller very much.

• biographies that you can find in your library’s juvenile biography section, such as Eleanor by Barbara Cooney (an amazingly good writer) and Beatrix by Jeanette Winter.

As a little one grows, she may prefer clicking and scrolling to turning a page, or she may not. But when they are little, when they can be mesmerized by a color, or by a word, and when they have little hands eager to hold things, hug things, and stroke things, give them books.

Cover illustration of Beatrix by Jeanette Winter