Textbooks Quotes

“To be better equipped for the tests that the year will bring — read a textbook. To prepare for the tests that life will bring — read a book.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It appeared clear to me - partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks - that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty. Defiance seemed the only dignified response to the adult world.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“Pero si la historia de México que se enseña es aburrida no es por culpa de los acontecimientos, que son variados y muy interesantes, sino porque a los que la confeccionaron no les interesaba tanto presentar el pasado, como justificar el presente.”
― Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Instrucciones para vivir en México

“To be a prosperous pastor one needs: (1) a bible (2) a tailored suit; and (3) a few psychology books.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“Native Americans cured Cartier's men of scurvy near Montreal in 1535. They repaired Francis Drake's Golden Hind in California so he could complete his round-the-world voyage in 1579. Lewis and Clark's expedition to the Pacific Northwest was made possible by tribe after tribe of American Indians, with help from two Shoshone guides, Sacagawea and Toby, who served as interpreters. When Admiral Peary discovered the North Pole, the first person there was probably neither the European American Peary nor the African American Matthew Henson, his assistant, but their four Inuit guides, men and women on whom the entire expedition relied. Our histories fail to mention such assistance. They portray proud Western conquerors bestriding the world like the Colossus at Rhodes.

So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as they say "discover," they imply that whites are the only people who really matter. So long as they simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with white Western exploitation rather than study it.”
― James Loewen

“The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history. If textbook authors feel compelled to give good moral instruction, the way origin myths have always done, they could accomplish this aim by allowing students to learn both the "good" and the "bad" sides of the Pilgrim tale. Conflict would then become part of the story, and students might discover that the knowledge they gain has implication for their lives today. Correctly taught, the issues of the era of the first Thanksgiving could help Americans grow more thoughtful and more tolerant, rather than more ethnocentric.”
― James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“He was so textbook the textbooks were jealous of him.”
― Kelly Siskind, The Beat Match

“While teachers often complain that their students seem to do very little thinking, teachers who simply follow the manual should understand that they are actually contributing to the problem. Students seldom learn to think under the tutelage of teachers who do not think either.”
― Donovan L. Graham

“These programs and reading series are the fruit of an intellectually exhausted literacy industry that lost its way long ago, even as we mutely accepted its misguided agenda - to complicate reading and literacy so that we will purchase its programs and materials.”
― Mike Schmoker, Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning

“It was always embarrassing when professors assigned their own books. Even Madeleine, who found all the reading hard going, could tell that Zipperstein’s contribution to the field was reformulative and second-tier.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“There is not one Indian in the whole of this country who does not cringe in anguish and frustration because of these textbooks. There is not one Indian child who has not come home in shame and tears.”
― Rupert Costo

“The knowledge we gain from textbooks can never measure to the wisdom we gain through experience.”
― Anika de Souza

“While you can't hold on to everything forever, you're a fool if you sell back your college books at semester's end: have you learned nothing of this life?”
― Ander Monson

“One critic complained to me that "Well, if you are right, we will have to rewrite the textbooks!" As if that were a bad thing ... [But], curiously, some of our most virulent critics are associated with NASA and the government. A NASA employee tells me that this attitude of opposition to impact threats is entrenched in NASA and is only now slowly beginning to change. When it became obvious to NASA decades ago that asteroids and comets are a serious threat, their employees were instructed by top government officials to downplay the risk. The government was concerned that the populace would "panic" over space rocks and demand action, when NASA couldn't do anything about them and didn't want to admit it. Plus, trying to mitigate any impact hazards would have used up funding they wanted to put elsewhere.”
― John Anthony West

“The school books are full of paid advertisements, and rubbish at that.”
― Karel Čapek, R.U.R.

“More wisdom can be transmitted through a novel than a textbook.”
― Laurence Galian, Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!

“Because the exponential distribution is so mathematically convenient, it is tempting to use it even when it is not appropriate.”
― thomas anderson, Operating Systems: Principles and Practice

“The word "Formal" in this context is a euphemism for "useless”
― Harry M. Schey, Div, Grad, Curl, and All That: An Informal Text on Vector Calculus

“Perhaps the greatest obstacle to systemic reform was that it required numerous stakeholders - textbook publishers, test publishers, schools of education, and so on - to change, which turned out to be an insurmountable political obstacle.”
― Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

“The other article was by Lois Weiner, a professor who prepared urban teachers at New Jersey City University. Weiner was a parent activist at P.S. 3 in District 2, which she described as a highly progressive alternative school with an unusual degree of parent involvement. She claims that district administrators were stifling teachers and parents at P.S.3 by mandating "constructivist" materials and specific instructional strategies ... She [Weiner] continued, "The degree of micromanagement is astounding." Those who challenged the district office's mandates, she said, risked getting an unsatisfactory rating or being fired. Weiner contended that "opposition from parents is building against the new math curriculum," which was supposed to be field-tested with control groups, but instead was mandated for every classroom." Teachers were expressly prohibited from using other math textbooks or materials, and some were clandestinely "photocopying pages of now-banned workbooks.”
― Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

“Challenge your self to read what your children are forced to endure, and then ask why we expect that textbooks - written and negotiated line by line to placate politically active interest groups in Texas and California - are up to the task of supplying a first-rate curriculum.”
― Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

“Before the war, they were happy, he said,
quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year

history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,
and better off under a master's care.

I watched the words blur on the page. No one
raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

“Dr Abdul Rahim Wong, PhD”
― Dr Abdul Rahim Wong, PhD

“Російські автори [шкільних підручників] мають дивовижно статичне бачення світу і дивляться на історію з погляду ленінського «хто кого?» або як на битви між богатирями чи між арміями, не розглядаючи ідеї, не проводячи кропіткої розшифровки цінностей і слабо усвідомлюючи найголовнішу проблему сучасності, а саме взаємин між Собою та Іншим.”
― Ewa M. Thompson, Трубадури імперії: Російська література і колоніалізм