The Problems of Textbooks and their Study Guides

The Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe                                                                                    Photo by Victor Grigas

It occurred to me the other day that it may be worth saying something about the philosophy behind A Little History of the United States. For lay readers, the purpose of the book may seem almost laughably self-evident. They remember being bogged down in high school or college with textbooks nearly a thousand pages long and filled with a relentless procession of details. Those readers, having long ago left the world of textbooks behind, wish to approach history in a less intimidating way. All well and good.
    For those of us who teach history, however, regularly wandering through the world of lesson plans, syllabi, study guides and textbooks, it’s worth thinking about the assumptions behind such materials. I’ll borrow here from the introduction to my Explorer’s Handbook, an informal guide designed to accompany A Little History:

Exploration Handbook? What’s that about? Why not just call it a study guide?
   Study guides are for textbooks, and A Little History of the United States is emphatically not a text. The philosophy behind its creation differs sharply from the textbook approach; and the distinction is important to understand.
    Textbooks are meant to be comprehensive. Implicitly they’re also prescriptive. What are the facts, dates and concepts that every reader should know? All of those items are included in the compendium. The student is required to master them. Indeed, the content of a textbook is generated from one or more curriculum standards. In American history, each state has a set. Some go on for dozens of pages. These things thou shalt know! Master them!
    How well does this strategy succeed? Despite 800 to 1000-page tomes, buttressed by teachers’ guides, student workbooks, map quizzes, test banks, websites, vocabulary lists, time lines and every imaginable study aid known to humankind, periodic surveys of student mastery indicate that for a vast majority, knowledge of American history remains astonishingly slim. There seems to be a radical disjunction between the curriculum standards that confidently proclaim the cornucopia of knowledge that shall be absorbed, and the sad reality encountered in everyday life. A current YouTube video making the rounds illustrates the point in depressingly broad strokes.
    If the textbook approach is failing so miserably, what’s to be done? A Little History of the United States uses a different strategy. It’s not comprehensive—far from it. A pickup truck is probably not capacious enough to hold all the names, dates, bills, laws, proclamations and treaties that are not named therein. Not that these facts aren’t important. Many of them are. But the textbooks crammed full of them don’t seem to be doing the job of communicating them effectively.
    The philosophy of A Little History can be summed up in an aphorism from the great modernist architect, Mies van der Rohe: less is more. As an architect, van der Rohe wanted his creations to reveal the purest, cleanest forms. He was born in the Victorian era, when living rooms were stuffed with bric-a-brac and the ornamented facades of buildings hid the skeletons beneath. Van der Rohe dispensed with the decorations and curlicues, the frills and furbelows. He believed that the simple, clean lines of his modern buildings and furniture allowed the essential structure to stand out.
The same approach can work for American history. Students need to understand why they should care about American history; and a slow slog through 900 pages overwhelms with detail. The forest is impossible to discern for the trees. Three-hundred pages, on the other hand, is brief enough to make the larger themes—history’s shapes—stand out.
    Hence the opposition here to the textbook philosophy of learning, which intends to make a thousand and one facts mandatory. The more one tries to be comprehensive, the less knowledge the overwhelmed student is likely to take away from the text. That’s not to say that the more detailed contexts of history are unimportant. It’s just that there’s no motivation to pursue those details if you don’t grasp the larger picture.

    Thus there is a kind of double-paradox behind the philosophy of less is more. A book of 300 pages rather than 1000 doesn’t necessarily mean less effort. Learning fewer facts and theories but learning them well may require as much time spent as the hapless soul does who flounders through the unabridged edition of American history. Rereading a tightly packed narrative is not a sin but a virtue. Secondly, a shorter narrative is not an endpoint but a beginning. For those who wish merely to have a refresher course in the main points of American history before moving on to another life, best of luck to you. But I suspect the larger number of readers will come away wanting to jump into specific areas of interest and dig deeper.
  For invariably, the deeper you dig, the stranger and more wonderful the story becomes. The Exploration Handbook makes suggestions for further readings on topics covered in Little History, and can be downloaded for free here.