From the Academy

Improving Textbooks

Anyone who has bothered to save school and college textbooks over the past forty or fifty years—or who will go to the trouble of turning over such textbooks as have accumulated in the attics of an old house—can see for himself that there has been a dismaying deterioration of quality with the passing of the decades. The paper, binding, illustrations, and typeface all have improved; but in style and substance, the text itself, in nearly all disciplines, has been reduced to boring and deceptive generalizations. Really first-rate textbooks for high schools now are difficult to obtain: the educationist pressure-groups have persuaded every big publisher in the field to adapt his textbooks to “progressive” and “permissive” standards.