good morning Hank it's Tuesday so
textbooks are expensive in fact since I
was born average textbook prices have
gone up by a factor of more than eight
far faster than inflation or housing
prices or even medical care Americans
spent over ten billion dollars last year
on textbooks which is significantly more
than we spent on all fiction like every
print book and ebook and audiobook of
Harry Potter and The Great Gatsby and
good night moon and those thrillers your
dad reads and oh my god we spend so much
money on textbooks and what makes all
this a little weird is that while
textbooks are much more expensive than
they used to be they are also like less
important when I was a kid if I wanted
to learn about say geometry textbooks
were basically the only way but now
there are lots of options there's math
agon an extraordinarily intuitive series
of online courses that has interactive
elements to help you understand and
confirm what you're learning or you can
watch three blue one brown videos that
help visualize complicated mathematical
concepts or you can follow Khan
Academy's series on geometry and all
these learning tools and many others are
entirely free now in many cases they are
not as comprehensive as textbooks but on
the other hand they are much more
interactive and also able to adapt to
different needs for different students
and just to reiterate instead of costing
ten billion dollars per year much of
which is paid by underfunded public
school systems they cost nothing okay so
every year Bill and Melinda Gates
release an annual letter and this year's
letter is about surprises they've
learned from the ways that data can be
sexist to house low innovation in toilet
technology has harmed human health and
they also say the textbooks are becoming
obsolete if you're interested in this
kind of stuff you should read the entire
letter link in the doobly-doo below but
in it Melinda points out that almost
half of college students are over the
age of 25 and more than half have a job
and she writes that these students often
don't have the time or resources to
effectively navigate an inefficient
inflexible learning environment I am
definitely not an expert in this but
anecdotally I do hear that from a lot of
students like price of educational
materials is one barrier to
post-secondary education but the way
those materials work or don't work is
another barrier and then for middle
school and high school students I often
hear that there is a huge divide between
the way that students action
we learn and the way that teachers often
want to teach and the textbooks and
other educational materials they are
required to use most textbook buying
decisions are not made by students or
teachers or even school administrators
they are made at the district or state
level now of course this standardization
does exist for a reason it's an attempt
to make sure that teachers are using
comprehensive and reliable resources to
teach kids what they need to know also I
think people in so-called edu tech have
spent way too much time trying to
replace teachers which just ain't gonna
work in my opinion like there is no way
to replace the incredibly vital
person-to-person work that teachers do
as bill says in the letter effective
educational materials should seek to be
a complement to what teachers do not a
replacement so our textbooks becoming
obsolete maybe but I worried that like
other things in our economy that are
growing more expensive textbooks are
somewhat impervious to the law of supply
and demand like the actual consumers
students and sometimes teachers often
don't have a lot of choice when it comes
to textbooks which I think limits
innovation and also makes them
artificially expensive the truth is I
have no idea how this will shake out I'm
terrible at predicting the future but I
will say this I got a c-minus in 10th
grade geometry which if anything was
generous and I've always been really
embarrassed about not understanding even
the basics of high school math I had
good teachers but they had a lot of
students and I just couldn't get it from
the textbook but then at the age of 41 I
worked my way through math Agins
geometry courses with some help from a
real-life math teacher and while I was
learning I kept being like oh wow cool
now I understand how tessellations work
and that makes me optimistic in spite of
it all Hank I'll see you on Friday