Ugh...yet another 'gift' left to us by Bush that will assist with Obama's takedown of America. Thanks RINO party.
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No need to.
The colleges and professors already control the textbooks, and they make sure that the texts support their indoctrination agenda.
The greatest outrage is the federal monopoly on college loans now.
That passes almost without comment.
These people are totalitarians in intent, but I think as they say down in Louisiana that their alligator mouths are going to overload their mosquito asses.
Our world is beginning to read more and more like a Left Behind novel every day, at an alarming rate.
The power grabs this guy is making is unreal and proceeding at an astounding pace.
Not that this law is a good idea at all ... but my guess is that this has little to do with content. Obama simply does not need to intervene to make college textbooks more liberal. Colleges self-regulate in that regard.
I took a college history class that was teaching from Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States”. He literally couldn’t make that book more liberal if he wanted to.
As to regulation of college profits from textbook sales ... I think they should be free to profit (as we all should be), but find it difficult to summon sympathy for lost profits at socialist institutions.
SnakeDoc
I don’t trust anything Obama does to ultimately be innocent.
But the rationale for tracking updated editions of textbooks I’m sure would be that it has become something of a scam for the publishers (and authors) to keep putting out minor updates, then require students to buy the newest edition rather than the previous editions that are widely available on the used market.
While the two parties are not the same, more evidence that the elites in both parties have the same goals- more control over us. New boss same as the old boss. The details change, but nothing else does.
Those ignorant of Mussolini’s ascendency in Italy are about to become intimately familiar with it.
If one can control the revisions, if one can control the price, then one can control content.
That is what is going to happen. It will be official, and done on a basis of price. The pool of approved authors will be subsidized in their efforts through other channels, of course.
We have already reached the point where a Bachelor's Degree is considered passe, to the detriment of those of us who worked our butts off decades ago to earn one.
The issue then, for many jobs was whether one had a High School Diploma, which actually implied a reasonable level of numeracy and literacy--no longer!
Now we will produce the best-educated ignoramuses in the world.
As Mark Twain said, "Never let your schooling interfere with your education."
Even if that provision was put in for reasons dealing with cost. (they change minor things and make for new textbooks each year) It will be abused. They are always making minor changes just so the old books can’t be resold and used for the next class.
In the context of pricing & availability, many textbooks are often re-issued with trivial revisions designed to deprecate previous versions and force purchase of new, expensive tomes instead of buying old, used, cheap, yet still entirely valid copies. Since a slight change in page & section numbers, tweaking of content, and modification of student exercises all add up to compelling an impractical level of comparison & reconciliation between old & new texts owned by many students, the school just requires the latest version and the students are stuck with shelling out ~$100 for something they could get a viable copy of for under $10. I consider it an unfair practice, just a hair this side of illegal price fixing; since it's "unfair" (yeah, it is), the polypragmatons (gov't busybodies) get involved and write laws like this.
That's the formal, reasonable explanation. I'll even grant it's probably the real reason. ...thing is, gathering such info and making 3rd-party decisions about what changes are "acceptable" for the above reason will lead to further questions about content beyond the limit of this law, leading to more laws & more oppression.
Friendly reminder / PSA:
ALL of MIT’s courses are available for FREE at http://ocw.mit.edu
If you want the _education_ it’s available at no cost. Diploma & personal classroom attention is extra.
More universities are doing this now.
Without exploring base motive and agenda, and without making a judgement: I would say this section is aimed at the publisher practice of making only minor change in a textbook, then releasing it as a new edition. This has the effect of generating sales of the "latest, most up to date" edition of these VERY expensive books, thus reducing or eliminating the book's resale value.
LS,
I beg your pardon in advance as you are probably aware of this thread’s topic,
but I decided to ping you as you might be interested.
Cheers!
I have no doubt that the leftists want to control textbooks just like every other facet of our lives, but this is a dumb argument. The revision of textbooks between editions is VERY MUCH tied to pricing. The only real reason that many revisions are made by the writers & publishers is to force students to buy new books at $100+ instead of getting used editions.
Although I am against goverment control of most things, including college textbooks, the answer to this question should be obvious: College faculty often require their students to purchase the latest edition of the textbook that they or their collegues have written even though the changes to the latest edition from the previous edition are insignificant. The result is that a student spends $150 for a new book, rather than $30 for a used prior edition of the same book from the same author, and the only difference between the two editions is a footnote on page 442, the size of the graph on page 561, and correction to a citation in the bibliography.
There are few college textbooks that are worth the paper. I teach college economics and have used the McConnell and Brue textbook...actually shows free markets in a positive light.
I thought education was controlled at the local level?
I’m all for cheaper books. Text books are a rip.
I know textbook$ are pricey as hell, but Bummer is doing us no favors by meddling in the matter.