Who Chooses Textbooks?

In 1964, Richard Feynman was sitting in the committee for choosing textbooks for Californian kids. Here’s what he said.

How are textbooks chosen? How should textbooks be chosen? Most country’s MOE sites don’t really share the process in detail. Singapore’s Approved Text Book List site alludes to the fact that different schools use different text books (but all from the list), but principles and teachers are the ones primarily helping CPPD in the review to create the approved list. On the extremely pedantic Malaysia’s Textbook Division website, there detailed description of the committee and their outcome, and lots of other details. The direct procurement follows various government procurement standards, but of course the nature of the interactions won’t be documented.

One thing is sure, it is not the “average” of random engineers in an aircraft company, like what Feynman said in his article. Education is an essential instrument for the government to create a collective mind share (read: propaganda) so in countries other than US, there would be a firm grip of what goes into those books read by innocent kids.

But are textbooks important in the information age, where kids can actually learn from any source? Yesterday I met a guy at the TDM event for the Star Challenge finalists who said that he has an issue with video search on his search engine, kindernet, which is a search engine dedicated to kids. He said his motivation is to white list sites, which if you think about it, is precisely what these MOE people do, “approved textbooks” et al. With better technology, I’m sure the MOEs of the world can get to where human beings create a set of constraints and preference, and then draw on a global pool of knowledge to create a “official search engine” for students of a particular education system, which is equivalent of “chosen textbooks”.

A long conversation with Herk also revealed another of my own biased perception that maybe textbooks are just intentionally made bad to cut cost and to have a huge ecosystem of tuition teachers, reference books and other extra educational help etc. thus boosting education dollars and the industry. Should you have the best teacher beamed to every classroom, teaching with the best textbook, not only would that destroy that economic opportunity for various strata of society, it also make schools create replicas across the country. So who knows maybe that’s the secret plan of someone “up there” keke

So as of now, let just hope that there’s good feedback mechanisms that could point out errata and stupidities in textbooks to the channels who can act on them. How much power a publisher can wield in the creation of textbooks would probably reflect the procurement climate of the country but more importantly the national interest which is at stake.