.5 Textbooks and Knowledge

The process of accepting knowledge in the schools, the process of agreeing on what should be taught is a really difficult process and that process slows us down. Right now the problem is we don't have a process. There is no way to decide whether something is acceptable for the schools or not, it just sort of happens. There is no one who tells the textbook publishers what to put in textbooks. They give it their best shot and if they guess right they sell textbooks and if they guess wrong they don't sell textbooks. Isn't that a good system? You have to generate a public interest and enthusiasm in something before something can be added and often the public is very fickle. Well anyway, we have finally accepted the knowledge for the schools and our next step is to write textbooks. After we write the textbooks, we have to adopt them. Writing textbooks is a long process, and incidentally the textbook publishers got tired of waiting for all those foolish professors like me to write a whole textbook. The publishers now write textbooks by committee. They have a professor to sponsor the process, but now they get a whole bunch of worker bees too. This way, if someone misses their deadline, they get someone else to do it and it is no big deal. By and large textbooks these days are written by committees, and there are long debates in terms of what to put in and what not to put in and how many pictures have to show women and how many paintings have to be by minority painters and all this political correctness. It is a huge process. But anyway, the textbooks are written finally and then the textbooks are adopted. They arrive at the school and say okay here are eight new textbooks in this subject, and you say we'll take that one and the textbooks are adopted. Now of course after the textbooks are adopted they have to be put in the classrooms. But then teachers must be trained to use these new textbooks, and after teachers are trained, then eventually the schools are on line. This whole process takes ten to twenty-five years and sometimes longer than that. It is rarely less than ten, but mostly between ten and twenty-five years.

	Why does it take ten to twenty five years for new knowledge to become accessible to students?	Answer Here
	Mr. Williams is a Biology teacher in a prominent high school. There has recently been new discoveries proven to be true in the field of Biology, but because the school insists that he teach from the book and the SOLs, which do not include this new knowledge, he is unable to share it with his students. How can this problem be prevented from happening in the future?	Answer Here