Why textbooks suck

I take as my starting point LIFE: The Science of Biology, since it is certainly the best textbook ever written.

LIFE has chapters that start with a question. This is very good. Here are some examples subchapter headings:

1.1 What is Biology?
1.2 How do biologists investigate life?
2.2 How do atoms bond to form molecules?
3.2 What are the chemical structures and functions of proteins?
4.5 How did eukaryotic cells originate?
7.1 How does glucose oxidation release chemical energy?
10.2 How do alleles interact?
12.4 How is RNA translated into proteins?
19.2 Is cell differentiation reversible?
26.6 How do prokaryotes affect their environment?
32.2 What is a protostome?
39.3 How do plants deal with climate extremes?
45.3 How do sensory systems detect mechanical forces?
51.5 How does the mammalian kidney produce concentrated urine?


The textbook contains very pretty pictures and diagrams and lots of self-quizzes. It does not however give me a reason to want to know the answers to any of the questions posed by the subchapters. It presumes that the simple fact that a student has signed up for a biology course is sufficient grounds to decide that the students have these questions. Or, possibly, it assumes that the professors in giving a lecture, have raised these questions in the student’s minds.

In my experience as a student, my main question was usually how much more of this stuff I had to read (the book is over 1200 pages), and maybe I could just skip it and get by.

My experience as a professor was that the most prevalent student question was what exactly they would be responsible for on the test.

My experience as a department chair was that lazy professors answered that last question by copying the self-study questions in the textbook.

We would all agree that a good course motivates the students to have the questions that the textbook answers in their minds so they can consult the textbook for the answer at their moment of need. There are two assumptions that need to be made here:

1. That professors know how to raise these question in student’s minds in a natural way
2. That the book is well enough organized that finding the answer when needed is trivial

I always wondered, as a student why professors didn’t just hand out the textbook and say “read it” and there will be a test in 3 months, since their lectures were usually irrelevant. Sometimes it was the textbook that was irrelevant. The students needed to quickly figure out which one wasn’t going to be on the test.

But if real learning is not a conscious process, as some (i.e. me) insist, then textbooks could only be ancillary to what a student was doing. But what are students doing? They are sitting and listening, which is a conscious process.

Now let’s imagine a world in which students are doing something. And, let’s assume that they want to do what they are doing and are excited by it. And let’s assume that they know what success at doing something looks like. Then the textbook in that case, would look exactly the same as it had before, except that chapters would be indexed to the goals of the students and the tasks that they were pursuing.

In other words, a textbook is like a mass of answers to questions that no one ever has. Making sure that students really are asking the questions that one might want them to ask would mean making sure that they were pursuing tasks that naturally raised those questions.

This is the role of on-line education. It can create the environment for an answer to be relevant to the pursuit of a goal by creating scenarios in which those questions naturally arise. This scheme however, eliminates an important part of the school experience.

It eliminates the instructor. No more lectures in the world I am envisioning, just mentors who help students when they are stuck.

Instructors will object. Students would not.

Sex, Math, and Videotape

Its that time of year again, where I rant about the absurd math score competition issue. This quote is from USA Today:


If there were a math-and-science Olympics for elementary and middle schoolers, USA students could hold their heads high — they're consistently better than average. In math, it turns out, they're improving substantially, even as a few powerhouse nations see their scores drop.

At the same time that I was reading this, I also saw this item (from Information Week):

One in five teen girls has sent a revealing photograph of themselves via cell phone or e-mail or posted nude or partially nude images of themselves online, according to a survey released this week. Eleven percent of them are 16 or younger.

How are these items connected?

What do we give school children to think about all day? We want them to think about the Quadratic Equation, and logarithms even though hardy any adult that they know knows what those are. They try to do math, but they don’t do that well at it. They know they are in a competition but that can’t figure out why it matters. (I assure you that no adult knows why it matters either, we are just sure that it does, kind of like who wins the discus throw matters.)

At the same time we give them lots of time to think about how people don’t like them, whether or not they are attractive, and what they can do to become attractive. Adults are horrified that they are doing this while they make sure that they all have the equipment to do it.

What is the problem? The problem is school. School enables children to set the standards for other children because children live in a world of children where the losers feel really bad about losing no matter what the game is. Children also learn to pretend that they care about the standards set by adults, like math scores, when all they really care about is getting into college.

We must stop this. Stop teaching children that math matters when it does not. Math in these tests means algebra, trigonometry and such, which almost never come up in anyone’s life. And stop teaching children that getting other children to like them matters. This only results in stupid behavior by which they try to impress and gain favor. We must stop grouping adolescents in schools and pretending to teach them math that no adult knows or needs to know so they can instead engage in dangerous behavior that no adult condones.

When You Can’t Afford Yale

A wealthy friend of mine is getting calls from his formerly wealthy friends who were recently employed at Lehman Brothers, and other brokerage firms, who are now no longer Masters of the Universe. They are looking for his help because they can no longer afford Yale tuition, nor the tuition at Riverdale and Spenser. What to do?

He has the ability to help them, and he sincerely wants to help. I understand their pain, and so does he. But my advice was “no.” (I couldn’t help thinking of the Risky Business line where the defeated Princeton applicant says I guess its the University of Illinois.)

This might seem like peculiar advice coming from someone who was professor at Yale for fifteen years (as well as a professor at Stanford and Northwestern for another fifteen years.) But, it is time someone set the record straight about these schools. Surely, no one currently employed by them will do so. Our current economic times demand the truth. These schools are simply not worth the money. There I said it.

While they will not admit it openly, the Harvard’s and Yale’s of the world are in a business that is different from the one economically struggling parents think they are in. The general public’s view is that these schools provide a superior education and provide a credential that is essential to upward mobility in the modern world. Nothing could be further from the truth.

These days, undergraduate credentials from an Ivy League school mean nothing. Our President-elect is considered to be a Harvard guy when what he did was attend Harvard Law. These days most people who want to succeed have graduate degrees. Graduate schools admit students from all sorts of universities that are much cheaper and much less elite than the Ivies. In fact, they strive to do just that to have a broad student body. You really don’t need to go to Yale to become a Harvard MBA. Our current President may have followed that path but his being a Bush was probably more important than his having attended Yale College where he didn’t do that well anyway.

However, the significance of graduate school in one’s life is not my real point. The Ivies are locked into an educational paradigm that really is of no value at all to most people. The real intent of a Yale education is to produce professors. Most professors at these places are excited by students who want to do the kind of research that they themselves do. These places aren’t called Research Universities for nothing. The idea is that a real education to any Ivy League Professor means becoming an intellectual of the type that that professor is. Professors at the Ivies are gratified by students who want to get PhDs in their subdisciplines and they really don’t care all that much about the rest. They will not admit this to anyone. It is an Ivy League secret.

If your son or daughter wants desperately to become a professor then sending them to a top Research University is a serous step towards opening their eyes towards doing research. If they do not intend to do research, then they can just go to any state college, collect the needed credential, and go on with their lives.

Send them to the existing public schools and help to create new charter schools that teach real world skills. Send them to a community college that teaches real world skills. Send them to a state university that charges next to no tuition. Let them learn about life by working. (There is a thought!)

In all cases their lives will work out just fine without Yale if they work hard, and you won’t have to beg friends for tuition money.

Girls Should Not Go To School

I was an only child. I went to an all boys high school. I had a girlfriend at summer camp each summer, but I really didn’t spend all that much time with the girls at summer camp. I went to an engineering school after high school. In those days there weren’t a lot of budding female engineers. So, when I got married a few years after college and began to get myself mentally ready to be a dad, I wasn’t even remotely ready to be the dad of a girl.

After a week or two of refusing to believe this had happened to me, I made my peace with it, but I had no idea what it meant. I didn’t know much about girls at all. I didn’t know what I should do, or what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to be very involved in child raising so I made a decision. I would simply not let sex matter much. I would raise a child. I would do whatever I might have done if that child had been a boy. I would not try to make her into a boy, but I wouldn’t try to make her into a girl either. I would raise a person.

My wife was not the girly-girl type, so she didn’t care when I decided that there would not be dresses, nail polish, or jewelry for my daughter. This was easier said than done. The only female with whom I had had a life long, deep relationship objected, and objected loudly. My mother was no girly-girl either. She was a tough and successful business woman who never met a situation she didn’t want to dominate. But she liked clothing and jewelry a lot, especially since she was in the jewelry business. When my mother appeared, Hana was to be put in a dress and that was that.

The reason I didn’t want Hana to wear dresses, apart from the fact that I thought that they looked stupid on an infant, was confirmed immediately at Hana’s “coming out” party. (By this I mean her coming to New York as a baby to meet the family for the first time. We lived in California.)

“Ooh, look at how beautiful she is.” “She is going to win all the boys.” “What a gorgeous dress.”

I was not planning on raising a sex object. I was raising a person who would be her own woman and not exist to hear how beautiful she was from whomever was trying to get something from her. I may not have understood girls, but boys I knew.

I stood firm. After New York, no more dresses. I wanted a rough and tumble child, not a girl who was worried about dirtying her dress.

Things went very well for a while. I loved Hana to death. I was almost over the girl issue. At Hana’s 2nd birthday party, there were two other girls present. There was an immediate leader and it wasn’t Hana. In fact, Hana was pretty much concerned with pleasing Miriam and imitating Miriam, a lot more than she cared about pleasing her parents. I noticed this behavior again on a regular basis when we moved next door to a girl named Annabee who was a year older than Hana. Hana, who by this time was toilet trained, became untoilet trained when she played with Annabee. Hana was also quite articulate by this time and she could pretty well explain that she was afraid to go to the bathroom when Annabee was around. She wanted to please Annabee and do whatever it was that Annabee was doing and who knew what would happen if time was taken out for the bathroom?

After about a year of this, and the realization that the stuff Hana was learning from Annabee was stuff it would have been just as well for her not to learn, my wife and I decided to eliminate Annabee from our lives. But this did not eliminate the problem.

What was the problem?

It was becoming clear to me that Hana was easily influenced by other girls who were more dominant that she. Hana was concerned with what they thought about her and wanted desperately to please them.

This became much clearer when she entered school. In fact, Hana went from being a lively, happy, verbally brilliant child to being miserable and anxious most of the time. When she thought about school what she thought about was not what she was learning at school but about her relationships with the other girls at the school. This manifested itself as who was being mean to her in the 3rd grade and then to worrying about what jeans she was wearing in the 6th grade, and then to learning to be the right level of enthusiastic on the softball team in high school.

She was so miserable at school that I decided, when she was 8, to take her out of school for a week or so and take her with me while I lectured in England. After work I took her on castle tours. She loved the trip (as well as subsequent trips – she says now that these were the best parts of her childhood).
But, on that first trip, all she could talk about was what one girl or the other was doing to her, or thinking about her, or planning. I pointed out that there were castles to be seen and that she needed to learn to be where she was and that where she was was England. But she was clearly being tortured.

All this was a long time ago. Hana has grown up into exactly the woman I had hoped she would be. She is female and behaves accordingly, but femaleness does not dominate her life. She likes jewelry and she wears dresses when appropriate. (She won that right when she was 8. My mother declared victory.) But, most of all, she became a person, which is what I was hoping for.

But all of this is just preamble. The real story starts now.

I was visiting Hana, who as I write this is the mother of an almost 3 year old boy and has another one on the way. She also runs a successful software consulting business and is, at the same time, a published author, which was always her real goal. So she is doing fine, and this is not about her.

While visiting her recently, I volunteered to take my grandson Milo to the park. Milo immediately started interacting with toys and kids in a way that made it clear that there was no role for me. So I sat and watched. What caught my eye was the mothers. They stood around and chatted with each other -- clearly they were all regulars. They were talking about their kids, no surprise, but what they were saying was indeed a surprise to me. They were saying more or less, that they were rotten mothers and that their kids weren’t so good either. Men don’t talk like that. I continued to listen.

I began to realize that what was going on was a continuation of what I had seen when Hana was growing up. Instead of competing about whether they had the right jacket on, they were now competing about who was the worst mother. Something was really wrong here so I asked Hana about it later. She said she witnessed this kind of behavior at every play group she attended with Milo as well.

I had, as a grown up male, frequently witnessed women competing with each on all kinds of things, the size of their ring, and the brand name on their pocket book, who had the latest fashion item on, and so on. I knew that women continued to undercut each other as they had done as children, but in more subtle ways. But I hadn’t realized they also competed in how bad they are at really important things.

What is going on here? Carol Dweck (professor of developmental psychology at Columbia) once said to me that little boys hit each other when they are angry but little girls undermine each other’s relationships. Indeed that was what Hana was concerned with when I took her on trips, I now realized. She didn’t know if her relationships in school would still be there when she got home. She loved the trips, at least in part, because they were a respite from the relationship breaking and mending that was going on at home.

I happen to be writing this on a boat in Greece, where various people come and go. And, I have noticed the same thing here. When there are more than two women on board, alliances form and the woman who is left out sulks while complaining of the bad things the others are saying about her. This happened so quickly each time various friends of the owner of the boat arrived, that I was really shocked by it.

But really it is the same thing, different place and time, that Hana feared while in school.

So now I come to thesis of this piece. I do not believe that girls should go to school. Here is why:
Girls are interested in relationships in a way that little boys are not. There is much evidence to support this. The reason is obvious. In a hunter gatherer society, women had to work together in ways that men did not. Establishing good relationships was probably the hallmark of success for females in primitive societies. This may be true today as well, but the instinct is very destructive in a society where men and women are equals.

Women are their own worst enemies in this regard. While Hana was busy thinking who did and didn’t like her, school was going on. Hana was not thinking about school or schoolwork, or learning. She was focused on the other kids. School was not about learning for her. Indeed, Hana tried very hard to not be the best in school, something she was surely capable of, because she would stand out and that would ruin her relationships.

She never did well in school, not badly, but not well. In fact, I made a point of putting her in a tougher high school program figuring that if she was going to be mediocre she could be mediocre in a better school. This is exactly what happened.

The same thing happened in college. There again, she was way much more concerned with what her friends were doing and who she liked and who liked her than she was with learning what school had to offer. Add boys into the picture and you get a girl who would prioritize the importance of what is being taught in class near the bottom of any list of concerns and priorities in school.

Of course, some girls do succeed in school by the standard measures, but those who do are often lonely and miserable because they have stood out in that way. They have chosen to be good students and have failed at relationships. Do some girls succeed at both? I am sure they do. But, that is really not the point. Even those who succeed at school are unhappy.

Girls have a way of making each other unhappy. This tendency comes naturally, but the school experience exacerbates it. If women lived in a society of their own, perhaps this wouldn’t matter as much. But all this undercutting and self-deprecation does not help them succeed in a society where half the participants behave differently.

The solution? Take girls out of school and put them into learning environments that are not inhabited by large numbers of children of the same age and same sex. A learning environment for girls should never include more than one other girl. The educational experience must be re-designed so that girls concentrate more on learning and less on relationships. Education needs to be divorced from socialization. Women are harmed by the idea that school is a place of socialization. No one has ever thought out coherently how that socialization should occur and what its goals are. Somehow we have just assumed it would happen properly but it clearly does not.

My experience with Hana has convinced me that school is a disastrous place to teach socialization. We need to re-design the system so that women can prosper in school and in life with less anxiety and more fun.

As I await the birth of my next grandchild I am again worried that it might be a girl. I feel confident in my own abilities to deal with her because I have grown and changed. But school and society have hardly changed at all.

I had a dream

I had a dream last night. Mr Obama called me and asked if I could say very simply what I wanted him to do about education. Then the connection died. So here is what I wanted to say:

1. Do what you can to encourage the individual states to get out of the education business.

2. Create an environment where curricula studied in school would be determined by people other than state legislatures and colleges, both of whom have proven they know nothing about learning.

3. Create learning places that encourage learning to do things rather than knowing things.

You said in one of your speeches something I have been saying for over 20 years. Communication, Reasoning and Human Relations are the real important skills. Please: Teach them.

CNN, the PKK, and why all education is the same

I saw a report on CNN that followed a reporter who had travelled with the outlawed PKK (Kurdish rebels.) She reported on their daily life which includes hiding in caves in mountains and having female leaders. Every day starts with -- guess what -- education! CNN showed their education methods which were, of course, the standard indoctrination sessions with one revolutionary telling the others what to think. Sounds familiar. Uh, yes. Sounds like school in all the rest of the world. Why is it that people who want to change everything never seem to want to change education? Perhaps they understand that all governments rule by discouraging innovative thinking. They don't want to change that.

How to reform the school system

Today I read one of those announcements that come from states from time to time about how they want to hire a head of their schools system who will lead reform. I don’t know whether that is what they really want, but let me simply explain who that person would have to fight in order to actually get any reform.

#1 The Colleges: The colleges prevent change by insisting on prescribing what courses must be taken by any applicant. The result is that no real innovation can take place.

First job for new reformer: Tell the colleges that their admission requirements will be ignored until they change them. No state university can reject all its in-state applicants, so the reformer will win.

#2 The State Board of Education Standards Committee: State Standards are always those set by Harvard in 1892. They must set some new ones that make sense for today or else stop setting standards which would be even better.

Second job for the reformer: Tell the State Board that when new sensible standards are set he or she will listen. Otherwise if its algebra and English literature and multiple choice tests one more time, you will be ignored.

#3 Special Interests: Book publishers, and test makers love the system the way it is. Why? Because they make lots of money on it.

Third job for the reformer. Find a way to convince these special interests to stop fighting change and start leading change. This can be done if the reformer understands what change is needed. That last bit is the hard part.