Pet Peeve — Textbooks

Yesterday, Steve took the kids for a long hike. With REM in the background, I sat in the arm chair in the living room and started plowing through the textbook that I’ve assigned for next semester’s Introduction to Political Science class.

It’s not a bad book. It hits upon the key words and terminology that the kids have to know. It helps provides the backbone for the class, and I’m assigning other readings to get conversation going. However, the writing gets bogged down with naming dropping.

Scholarly writing has become very formulaic with predictable structures — introduction, literature review, methodology, findings, discussion, and conclusion. Boiler plates are useful. They make writing less overwhelming, because you know where to plug things in. The reader knows where to find things.

The literature review section is designed to show how your work fits in with the scholarly debate. “Prof. Smartypants says this and Prof. Smartyboots says that. My research sides with Prof. Smartypants in this regard, but Prof. Smartboots in that regard.” The drawback comes when your ideas or your interests are entirely new and you have to make strained references to distantly related material. This also has a larger impact on non-scholarly writing.

The writers of textbooks have been so steeped in this style of writing that many can’t get out of it. Textbooks, which are aimed at 18 year old kids, have become name dropping catalogs instead of beautifully written discussions of a topic. The average student doesn’t want to know and doesn’t need to know what Prof. Smartypants has to say about the party system. She needs to know what parties are, how they developed, why different countries develop differing models. The textbooks blow past the basics. They miss opportunities for great anecdotes and examples that will grab the kids imaginations. They are aimed at junior level faculty who are easily impressed with references to their advisors and the big names in the field.

Whenever I read these textbooks, I’m get distracted with thoughts about how they could be better. If I wrote this book, I would talk about this and that and completely delete this long passage. I know where the students are going to get derailed by the name dropping nonsense. I often think that I could do it so much better. But then I think better of it.

Years ago, my dad wrote an Introduction to American Government textbook. It was an excellent book and I used it when I first started teaching in the mid-90s. However, he got burned by the project. He spent years writing it and revising it, but got little pay off for his work. Textbooks don’t gather the same respect as boiler plate papers for conferences. And then the small publishing company that he worked with got eaten up by a middle sized company. The middle sized company was gobbled up a short time later by a larger company, which already had a similar textbook. Good-bye dad’s textbook.

So, I’ll never write a textbook, and the students and I must suffer through these name dropping books. However, we’re supplementing it with Dad’s other textbook, which is now in the 15th edition.