Removing Textbooks Can Solve Problems with High School Education

Posted on by

JONATHAN LE Staff Writer

A high school class in Virginia is no longer using textbooks and is still succeeding in teaching lessons. 

The teacher, Mark Ingerson, believes that textbooks contain an excessive amount of information. He states that they tend to make the students forget everything because there is too much content to remember. 

Getting rid of textbooks may allow students to retain more information and hold more benefits than the way we use them today. Ingerson has been teaching without the use of textbooks for quite a while and his method has been shown to be successful, which may be enough reason for people to support his methods.

 Ingerson’s philosophy can also be deemed accountable due to the statistics of his students compared to the common student. Typically, on the AP Government exam, there is a 55 percent pass rate which is nothing compared to the 93 percent pass percent rate of students taught by Ingerson. 

Unlike textbooks that may have outdated material, students who get their information online will have much more data to bring to a discussion. If other high schools and classes switch off of textbooks and teach the actual concept of the lesson, classes could be more efficiently. The statistics shown by Ingerson’s class may be credible and greatly supports his case. However, schools should still experiment with this new idea that textbooks may actually not be all that useful. 

The success of Ingerson’s class is clearly not enough to fully prove that this idea is true, however. Schools should implement the ridding of textbooks on a small scale at first to truly find out if textbooks are beneficial. Depending on the outcome from the testing, schools should react accordingly and decrease the amount of textbooks used if it shows that textbooks really are not that useful.

 If the state implements a system where schools do not use textbooks, schools then could save money that would be typically be spent on buying new textbooks. Textbooks could easily be summarized and the ideas contained in them could be highlighted. The important message that it wants students to notice could then be taught directly, making education more efficient. Teachers should be allowed to let their skills shine. It may be time for textbooks to retire.