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Originally Posted by J. Strnad
Good for them. I'm still pissed off over what my textbooks cost back in the 1970s!
In all fairness, dealing with textbooks is an enormously people-intensive endeavor for a publisher. But as with all publishing, new alternatives are emerging that are changing the business.
I'm concerned that decentralizing textbook content will result in a Balkanization of education, so that someone educated in California has a vastly different education than someone who goes to school in Texas. Vastly different, to the point of living in different realities.
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The US had what you are calling "Balkanized Education" before. It caused us to become international leaders.
The old system of unpaid schoolboards detirmining curriculae produced exponentially better results than the current system of overpaid, centralized bureaucrats performing that function. Maybe that is because the local doctors, engineers, chemists, carpenters, mechanics, and business owners know more about what knowledge is needed to accomplish things than academics with Phds in education.