Word: text-book
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...John Jay Chapman, writing in the December "Atlantic" on "Our Private Schools," finds that college entrance examinations have done more than anything else to destroy education in the secondary schools. Hardly less important as a contributory cause, he thinks, is the shift in emphasis from teacher to text-book...
...well-to-do people are nonliterate, Mr. Chapman adds that the private school is looked upon as a sluiceway to college. All through their life in the private school the boys are so oppressed by the spectre of the college entrance examination, marching upon them with a chastising text-book, that they cannot "find the leisure to be truly interested, truly absorbed in any thought." The remedy--Mr. Chapman uses the teaching of English as an example--is the reading of good books, learning poetry by heart, and practising composition under the eye of a talented man of letters...
...There are scholars, Dr. Beard included, who work up their lectures every few years in text-book form. Such books, however, distilled as a refined product out of their study, are not the same live material as the original lectures. Furthermore, from the stand-point of the publishers it is not practicable to bring out new editions with every advance in a subject. In consequence, text-books are often very much out-of-date. So, with the constant revision and revaluation of knowledge, the lecture is the instrument in education best designed to accomodate itself to the needs...
Well-it's fine to meet a romantic novelist again, after all these able young gentlemen whose text-book is What Every Young Man Ought to Know. I fancy such things do not greatly worry Mr. Farnol. He takes the facts of life for granted and proceeds from that basis to write of the things which lead away from life. Only think what a book Carl Van Vechten or Floyd Dell might have written if either one of them had been, like Jeffery Farnol, a stagehand and a scene painter on Broadway for two years-or perhaps it would...
Moreover - and this must be to its credit as a text-book - the author suppresses his personal views throughout with rather uncanny skill. No interesting prejudices mar the smooth uniformity of a text as flowing and clear and lacking in depth and shadings as a single straight line of ink drawn across white paper...