Word: textbooks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Course materials are getting more expensive. Over the last two decades, a Government Accountability Office study found that textbook prices have risen at double the rate of inflation. The situation is so out-of-control that Senator Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., has introduced legislation to help defray some of the $898 a year on average that students shell out for textbooks...
...high cost of textbooks and coursepacks can be blamed on a number of factors. Textbooks include more and more extras every year, like CD-ROMs and accompanying websites, which raise their cost. Fully 80 percent of the textbook market is controlled by just five publishers, limiting competition and driving prices up as high as students can bear. Furthermore, the very people who choose textbooks, namely professors, don’t bear their cost, providing them with little incentive to consider price as part of the academic equation. Though bells and whistles aren’t an issue, coursepack prices...
...History 10a, primary sources are only a second thought, a decoration added to the textbook and lectures. Aidan E. Tait ’08, who took the course her freshman year (and who is also a Crimson editor), says that despite reading great works in History 10a, “We never managed to tie anything together or to relate the readings to the textbook or lectures at all. We never really grappled with the texts, and we never contextualized them.” Such a superficial, textbook-based narrative is not representative of the offerings of the History Department...
...probable goal is not to take a historiographical stance, but instead to fill the minds of all participants with the dates when Caesar was killed, Charlemagne crowned, and Columbus welcomed to the Caribbean. Such a pathetically humble goal can in fact be accomplished by reading a history textbook or two and should take no more than a week. In an undergraduate curriculum, it can be achieved in more imaginative ways, such as through a distributional requirement: one could, for instance, expect concentrators to take a pre-1500 class and a pre-1800 class. In addition, to ensure that...
...preempt such blunders in the first place. This requires a level of imagination and foresight that September 11 exposed as sorely missing from our government, and, as Hurricane Katrina showed, is still missing today. The biggest problems that now face America aren’t of the textbook variety: enemies do not identify themselves with bright red uniforms, nor do natural catastrophes necessarily obey rules of prediction. Until the administration chooses to confront this truth, it condemns itself to the same pattern of complacency, negligence, and rhetorical bandaging that by now has become its signature...