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JonathanBoyerFirstPaper 16 - 16 Dec 2009 - Main.JonathanBoyer
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**UNDER REVISION**
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Closing Achievement Gaps with the Free Flow of Information: Challenges Posed by America's K-12 Public Education System | | | Free Textbooks & Curriculum Plans | |
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< | The presentation of educational material to students in American schools is largely guided by two things: textbooks and curriculum plans. More so than in some other countries, "textbooks are ubiquitous and widely used in classrooms" and are the primary educational crutch of teachers. See How Do Teachers Use Textbooks? Given this entrenched reality, the educational success of a school as a whole (given a normal distribution of teacher quality) largely depends on the quality of available textbooks. When such is the case, it is exceedingly important to be confident that the absence of monetary incentive to create textbooks, due to lack of property protection, will not reduce the quality of available textbooks.
Assuming that "Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law" is correct in that creating things for others is an emergent property of human minds, the broader question is whether this holds true for textbooks as strongly as it does for educational software. While software programming is fundamentally creative in the sense that manipulation of programming language in certain ways produces distinctly new interactive capabilities, textbook authoring is arguably much less creative in the sense that manipulation of language in writing is just that -- manipulation of language. Nothing quite as new is spawned. The narrower question, then, is whether this creative difference between textbooks and educational software is a meaningful one under the terms of Moglen's Law. | >
> | The presentation of educational material to students in American schools is largely guided by two things: textbooks and curriculum plans. More so than in some other countries, "textbooks are ubiquitous and widely used in classrooms" and are the primary educational crutch of teachers. See How Do Teachers Use Textbooks? Given this entrenched reality, the educational success of a school as a whole (given a normal distribution of teacher quality) largely depends on the quality of available textbooks. When such is the case, it is exceedingly important to be confident that the absence of monetary incentive to create textbooks, due to lack of property protection, will not reduce the quality of available textbooks. Assuming that "Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law" is correct in that creating things for others is an emergent property of human minds, the question, then, is whether the difference between writing textbooks and programming educational software is a significant one in terms of their creative essences. | | | On the assumption that quality of textbooks would not be negatively affected, the benefits of a free textbook market are fairly obvious: associated costs would no longer be crippling to schools in low-income neighborhoods, and, at least theoretically, a richer variety of materials would de-handcuff teachers. At the same time, a free database of more creative curriculum plans, as textbook supplements, would allow teachers to experiment with methodologies at no cost. |
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