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Sun Founders' Push For Open Source Education
theodp writes "Unfortunately for textbook publishers, Scott McNealy has some extra time on his hands since Oracle acquired Sun and put him out of a job. The Sun co-founder has turned his attention to the problem of math textbooks, the price of which keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. 'Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,' McNealy quips. 'We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks' in the US, he adds. 'It seems to me we could put that all online for free.' McNealy's Curriki is an online hub for free textbooks and other course material. Others hoping to bring elements of the Open Source model to the school textbook world include Vinod Khosla (who co-founded Sun with McNealy), whose wife Neeru heads up the CK-12 Foundation, which has already developed nine of the core textbooks for high school."
>> Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,' McNealy quips
Nonetheless, Mississippi is going to complain if a standardized math textbook doesn't include information about Jesus riding a Brontosaurus.
I have a weird hobby of collecting pre-1950 textbooks, and frankly I think kids learned "more" back then from their textbooks than they do today.
Go back farther and it's even more pronounced.
But, consider that as you go back in time you find fewer people in school as a proportion of the population. Which means that (a) they were probably the smarter ones, a tranche we would now label as A or B students; and (b) the teachers were a smaller and probably a smarter subset of the population as well, as opportunities to use bookish intelligence as an adult are rare in agrarian economies and teaching would be the obvious job. And the schools were deliberately more selective and demanding. Requiring better performance and gearing your lessons to attain it from the beginning means the students remaining later on will be higher on the scale. Resting on adequate performance and spending the time making students with the least learning capacity achieve average results will not have that effect.