Or should I just start casually addressing how nearly everything in society has turned into a pathetic money-making scheme that under-delivers on every single broken promise.
Oh and creates GOVERNMENT DEPENDENCY aka slavery.
Why aren't textbooks free? Government funded video archives of recorded lectures would not be nearly as expensive to produce as all these wasteful expenditures for gender programs in Pakistan.
Even uploading lectures to a corporate video site could at least monetize them with ads.
The answer is: Nobody wants "free education". They just want to scam people into thinking they do so they can scam them more.
Is anyone else sick of this?
Why am I pretending to debate people who aren't interested in actually providing professional and classical "education" to as many people as possible on the lowest cost possible? Or even debating what's useful in schools.
Everybody who goes into government always wants the most wasteful, expensive, least efficient, self-destructive thing possible.
Can we just address this and fix it?
Why are people learning about sex, race, drugs, and "black lives" at all instead of basic skills in economics, budget, shooting, sewing, basic electronics, etc?
The "education" industry is ruining everybody.
No pressure to profit from textbooks would boost our quality of content as well
How about we don’t entitle people to the labor or property of others? I thought the 13th amendment took care of that.
Or maybe when I pay the university for the privilege of doing graduate research, that I am able to use the facilities and faculty conduct experimentation. That would be nice.
Textbooks are ripoffs but the bigger ripoff is tuition.
Fun facts:
Individual exploration of books and Socratic method individual tutoring is the classical form of achieving enlightened education, along with some military training and ‘le grand tour’ foreign travel during young adulthood.
Unschoolers who engage in no formal curriculum test within a single grade level of their school-imprisoned age peers, and home schooled students perform far better.
Google already has the full text of almost every book in existence digitized and OCR’d. It’s just not available... to you.
All the classics ARE available right now, for free, at https://www.gutenberg.org
Copyright is a form of government monopoly, not an inalienable right, ethical principle, or market necessity.
The real-world outcomes from copyright and other ‘intellectual property’ enforcement are exactly opposite of the justifications and reasoning on which the laws creating them were ‘sold’ to the public.
‘Intellectual Property’ was a term Bill Clinton popularized to fool people into believing that offshoring our manufacturing wouldn’t decimate our economy and national security.
Intellectual Property is information, not fungible property. It doesn’t truly exhibit any of the normal attributes associated with property, such as natural depreciation or scarcity.
There are 90s RINOs on this board who won't like what you're saying.
I always ask "What is the lat. and long. of this intellectual property?"
No problem with copyright for life of the author/27 years for a company (they need a timeframe because companies are theoretically immortal). Patents somewhat similarly.
But the idea of "IP" on Children's Stories or Birthday Songs getting on a century old is absurd.
Textbooks are incredible rip offs generally written by one of the universities professors. They shouldn't be free, but since there is no competition, they should be price controlled and they shouldn't be able to make a few changes so you can't sell the old book back.
The dirty secret is that 80% of the content is written by 30-something Liberal Arts BAs and very little by the illustrious professors listed as the authors, who mostly get paid for name use. Sometimes all they do is review a few paragraphs.
We can take their argument at face value or go after their real goals which this kind of argument is just a thin veneer for. The real crux of their argument is "give me your stuff that you worked for that I do not want to work for". Now that does not sound so great and people will fight them on that so they will come at it from another more "righteous" appealing angle such as "helping under privileged" or "saving lives".
If you take the free school to the furthest it can go then the government just declares everything free no working needed. Now how are people motivated to produce things or work when everything is free?
Textbooks aren't free because you aren't entitled to the product of people's labor.
Fucking communist.
let's get rid of the police and firefighters and libraries then
/headscratchmeme
As a student I'm biased but I think it is criminal what the education system has done to indoctrinate students into believing that you need a degree to be successful. Couple that with the stress and sheer ridiculousness of how large these loans are, I'd argue something needs to be done and some degree of forgiveness would be due.
Either way, we need to stop this racketeering business first and deal with what to do with those who have already been duped later.
We could stop subsidizing textbooks.
The best instructor I had in college didn't use a textbook to teach, but just to give us all problems to work. The man had knowledge of the entire field.
The textbooks are highly subsidized and change editions every few years to prevent reselling. We can definitely bring textbook prices down. It's just that the publishers and Democrats are in bed together. Big Pharma is like that too. We could get affordable medicines and healthcare, but they get so much money from working with Democrats that it just won't happen.
"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
Textbook industry is a massive, massive political influencer. States should really just hire based profs to write a textbook, good on many subjects for a decade with maybe an occasional revision, would cost a couple of million bucks, and upload it.
Or people could just do this and get the state to make it part of the Curriculum.
Taking over K-12 and State U's should be a top priority. That and suing the shit out of every Leftist Org and power center for the least of reasons, all the time.
That's how the Left took over, they got into Education and sued every American Institution until they won some crazy lawsuits and create precedence.
This is a horrible idea. What incentive will people have to write textbooks if you don’t allow them to profit from it? Or are you going to have the government pay them like a socialist.
You may say that you’re forced to buy a textbook your professor chooses and they make outrageously high profit knowing that you’ll do that, and I would agree, but making textbooks “free” wouldn’t help.
Public K-12 and Unis use textbooks too. They add hundreds, sometimes thousands, per year unnecessarily to the cost of TAXPAYER funded education.
Algebra doesn't change every 5-7 years and require all new textbooks. Neither does English Composition, Art History, and many other subjects.
Textbooks are ground zero for kickbacks and Taxpayer fleecing and Social Justice Propaganda. Not to mention EduFads ("Whole Math, Sight Reading, Diversity").
Open source textbooks created and issued by the state would cost a fraction to develop and deploy than Private Textbooks which sell mostly due to kickbacks and propaganda.
Additionally, in Red States the textbooks would be under popular control. Private Textbooks are generally written to appeal to Leftwing Teacher's Union and Social Science Communist Teachers and Professors, along with Board Members with long connections to the EduOctopus.
Still a bad idea. If public schools don’t think a new text book is worth it they just won’t get one. They have a budget after all, and not much of one at that, a text book has to be pretty special to make them want to switch. What you’re saying is let’s have almost never have a new text book published ever again because we got rid of any incentive to write one. It’s the same reason all socialism doesn’t work - The Law of Unintended Consequences.
Most people don't pay attention. Most Textbooks in Most Public Schools are woke. They are selected by woke EduAdmins and Teacher's Union Activists. There's also very little choice, the field in dominated by 2-3 big textbook publishers. Then there's all the kickbacks in terms of campaign donations and paid for trips to conferences in exotic locations.
There's no reason to pay tens of millions annually for textbooks across the state, when the state can commission it's own textbook and provide it for a fraction of the cost. There's way too much contractor domination of Government at all levels. Plus, local printers can print it free of charge as public material and make some money selling to students who prefer a paper copy.
Same reason the Little NH town I lived in had a libertarian school board member, he agreed - it was far cheaper for the school to provide it's own buses than to contract with Gaylord, who demanded a minimum yearly fee if a number of students to be picked up wasn't reached. The cost was not justified by the small number of students. Sometimes the Gov just doing it is cheaper and better.
It starves the EduAdmin & Textbook beast, while eliminating Wokey and Hokum, like the apocryphal Betsy Ross getting two pages on her alleged flag design (the evidence for this is scanty, it's mostly a folk tale) while Washington gets only a few paragraphs in a Major School Book used by 10k's of High Schools.
We have one of the highest per-pupil expenditures in the country, and the cost of K-12 textbooks plays a substantial role in that.
If we learned anything in the past year, it's that Corporations pursue their own interests, against America and American Values in many instances. Such as Massively Subsidized Delta, to Coca-Cola. Not to mention import-dependent Amazon, and thus the bias of WaPo, both owned by Bezos.
The Chinese are pulling off what Krushchev vowed to do - subverting America by bribing and offering cheap shit to Bureaucrats AND Corporate America.
You’re still fixing the wrong problem. If you do t like how the school board picks text books change the school board. Don’t disincentive writing textbooks. You’re literally being this meme right now. You’re that last person in this meme.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/021/929/Autistic_Screeching.png
Republicans are famous for standing on certain Principles at the exact wrong time.
This is a great example.
We have a major problem with Marxist Indoctrination and worrying about incentivizing textbooks is not really important right now.
Fixing the Marxist Indoctrination is Job #1, providing renumeration for highly politicized left-wing companies is Job #2,453.
Now you’re purposefully being dumb. Let’s stop Marxist indoctrination by becoming Marxists ourselves.
No, you're failing to see the woods from the trees.
You're willing to give taxpayer contracts to organizations that are blatantly pro-Marxist and live in a Marxist Ecosystem, because not giving those government taxpayer financed contracts to these Marxist Orgs is somehow "Anti-Capitalist".
I'll give up one little piece of government contracting, to get a big victory over Marxist textbooks out there.
That's what Churchill meant when he talked about making small concessions to win big on principle.
Hence, picking the wrong hills to die on and finding principles at the wrong time.
Like Gov Sununu deciding that defunding CRT at NH Taxpayer schools was somehow "Anti-Free Speech", or Gov Noem deciding not to protect women's college sports because of "Legal Scholars on the National Level", even though the NCAA bylaws prohibit banning competitors, individual or team, from competitions due to state laws.