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During the First Presidential Debate (October 3, 2012) I heard Barack Obama mention "10 year old textbooks" in a negative way.

It means that the teacher that I met in Las Vegas, wonderful young lady, who describes to me -- she's got 42 kids in her class.

The first two weeks, she's got them -- some of them sitting on the floor until finally they get reassigned. They're using textbooks that are 10 years old. That is not a recipe for growth; that's not how America was built.


Is there actually any evidence that shows old text books are actually a significant hindrance in a good education?

It seems like older books would correlate with other lack of funding, so it might be a hard to isolate causation or find valid case studies where that variable is even somewhat controlled. But to me it seems most of the stuff I learned in high school hadn't changed in the past 10 years. Have there been any studies?

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Kyle Brandt
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    In biology, they are absolutely a hindrance. In physics-- well, Newton's equations haven't changed much. Math, same thing. Social studies/history, maybe. Just depends on how fast the field moves and what knowledge is expected to be known at a high school level. – mmr Oct 04 '12 at 01:54
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    Yeah, having an history book where in red in the middle of the world the map there is the USSR can be hilarious, but also a bit sad. – Zenon Oct 04 '12 at 01:58
  • @mmr: Your comment made me think of another problem with any study like this -- how to measure any results. It is a bit subjective because different people might put a different weight on accurate facts vs. a general facility in comprehension. (Just a tangent though, would still be really interested in any attempted studies that takes the issue beyond the anecdotal (In particular when you take into account the costs http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/09/minnesota-teachers-write-_n_1084972.html )) – Kyle Brandt Oct 04 '12 at 02:03
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    @mmr - Actually, mathematics has changed. The advent of computers has drastically changed the way we do things. We have learned a vast amount about numerical methods in past years, so at least some of what is said in those old books is simply bad advice. The teaching of probability and statistics is gradually moving more into lower schools, where our kids need to understand these topics to succeed. –  Oct 04 '12 at 02:10
  • @woodchips: I guess why I am skeptical is that although over 10 years there will be major improvements in almost any field, people still might be able to get an a good education in terms of comprehension that would allow them to easily "catch up" because of a good, albiet somewhat out-of-date, education in any field. But I can't find any studies with actual evidence supporting either theory. – Kyle Brandt Oct 04 '12 at 02:17
  • A job I was given some years ago was to weed out old mathematics texts from a corporate library, then recommend some new ones to upgrade what was on the shelves. There were simply too many texts in there that were teaching the wrong things for numerical methods. Some classics were worth keeping of course. –  Oct 04 '12 at 02:37
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    I do think that a good teacher can overcome a bad text. A poor teacher is lost with any text. –  Oct 04 '12 at 02:39
  • @woodchips--I'm pretty familiar with how the field has changed, and techniques such as newtonian integration are definitely still in use. Being able to do these techniques on paper is a good way to demonstrate knowledge. Same with the median, mode, mean, etc. I often write algorithms on paper using those old math techniques before writing any code at all. Even if we taught 12 year olds calculus, if they can't do it on paper, they can't do it. Having said that, I'd love to see a 'bad' math text. – mmr Oct 04 '12 at 02:45
  • @Zenon depends on the era it's covering. If it is about the period between 1917 and about 1990 I'd expect that map to be there :) – jwenting Oct 04 '12 at 07:18
  • A lot would depend on the specific text. An introductory text on Newtonian physics doesn't provide any different information whether written in 1970 or 2010. An advanced text on nuclear tomography may be outdated a few months after being published. – jwenting Oct 04 '12 at 07:20
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    Is it about the **content** of the book, or rather the **physical state** it's in? – vartec Oct 04 '12 at 10:26
  • btw. I hardly can think of any discipline advancing faster than computer science. Yet for example [this book from 1983](http://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-Algorithms-Alfred-Aho/dp/0201000237) is still in use today. – vartec Oct 04 '12 at 10:29
  • @vartec - The fondations haven't really changed much and a lot of professors like to warn off potential graudate students by warning them that "All of the low hanging fruit has already been plucked." – rjzii Oct 04 '12 at 11:40
  • @mmr Even assuming the content hasn’t changed, teaching methods have progressed. A lot. Teaching as a science is still very much in its infancy and relies on a lot of handwaving and tradition rather than rigorously evaluated methods. This is only just starting to change. – Konrad Rudolph Oct 04 '12 at 12:59
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    @KonradRudolph nonsense, it's been changing for centuries, going back and forth like a pendulum. The ancient Greeks taught mostly one on one, then classroom teaching was invented, going back to masters and aprentices in the middle ages, to classrooms that grew larger and larger to cut costs in the 20th century, and now some people are getting the idea that smaller groups and more direct involvement of the teacher might be a good idea. – jwenting Oct 04 '12 at 13:38
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    @jwenting You have no idea what you’re talking about. Just because ideas about the earth’s existence and laws of the Universe have always changed doesn’t mean that physics, which once again changed ideas, isn’t right. The same argument, 1:1, goes for teaching. Teaching until very recently was pure potluck, not subject to a single objective study. This *is* changing. Teaching success *can* be objectively quantified and this is being done. – Konrad Rudolph Oct 04 '12 at 14:32
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    @KonradRudolph I know full well what I'm talking about, thank you very much. Yes, there's more "research" into "teaching methods", but that doesn't mean there's no cyclic trend in those, and that no different things have been tried over the centuries. It also doesn't mean that newer is always better (a lot of the new "teaching methods" tried over the last several decades have been unmitigated disasters). – jwenting Oct 04 '12 at 14:52
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    @jwenting Well, your comments make it sound like you don’t. Nowhere did I imply that “newer is always better”. I very carefully stressed that what we are changing now, we are changing with the benefit of high-quality empirical evidence. This has *never before* been the case. Dismissing this as “nonsense” or “newer isn’t always better” is deeply luddite and frankly just ridiculous. – Konrad Rudolph Oct 04 '12 at 16:42
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    @woodchips: surely informatics has changed the way we do math. However, for primary/middle school level math, computational calculus is generally not a requirement. – nico Oct 06 '12 at 10:40
  • @KonradRudolph - State of the art research in teaching methodology - even if it is effective - has very little correlation to quality of education. So does spending on shiny new last year's textbooks for that matter. Things like discipline, social promotion policies, politics of teacher unions, and the fact that a large slice (if not an outright majority) of current students come from families that don't see any need in instilling the value of learning has a lot more to do with that. – user5341 Oct 08 '12 at 07:32
  • @DVK I never claimed that there’s a silver bullet to provide the perfect education for everybody, erasing all differences. That’s a facile point to make. However, modern teaching research *can* help overcome some of these boundaries, especially since they emphasise (much more than previously done) individual differences between students. In fact, I’d say that this emphasis (and everything that follows) is the core contribution of modern didactics. – Konrad Rudolph Oct 08 '12 at 08:46
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    @jwenting: Since your reply of “nonsense” ostensibly referred to Konrad’s “rigorously evaluated methods” comment, which latter you completely ignored, it is apparently _literally_ true that you didn’t know what you were talking about. – Peter Beattie Oct 08 '12 at 12:42
  • @jwenting: “a lot of the new "teaching methods" tried over the last several decades have been unmitigated disasters” — Nice handwaving. Also, completely ingnores the qualitative point that Konrad made, about “rigorously evaluated methods”. Further, also ignores that a lot of the _old_ “teaching methods” (why the scare quotes, btw?) were also unmitigated disasters. Further still, newness would be irrelevant, only substantive differences to old methods would be worthy of consideration. – Peter Beattie Oct 08 '12 at 12:53
  • We should have faith in Generation XL – Chris S Oct 10 '12 at 21:12
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    This is not a sensible question, because the point of the speech is not "they have old textbooks and that is bad" but "they can't afford new textbooks, and that's bad". Also it's a political speech, not a logical argument. – DJClayworth Mar 20 '13 at 03:07
  • Perhaps a good first question would be, do any teachers teach the book? I, personally, have never seen a book used as anything other than an assortment of problems, the teacher can assign as homework. The actual content, is never mentioned or used. Presumably, some children might read the book, but whenever I have had a question about the material, I just went online. – Jonathon Oct 30 '15 at 16:22
  • While the **information** may the the same for subjects like Maths, English, Physics, the **pedagogy** keeps moving forward. Old books will have old pedagogy. –  Feb 15 '18 at 10:56
  • To clarify: Is the question about 10 years old as in "written 10 years ago", or is it about 10 years old as in "this book has been used for 10 years and consists mostly of duct tape"? – Peter Feb 15 '18 at 20:57

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