The California Textbook System

Angebote / Angebote:

Excerpt from The California Textbook System: An Indictment of a Plan That Bars Free Textbooks, That Prevents a Democratic System of Local Adoptions, That Interferes With Our Educational Development, and That Costs the People Unreasonable Prices for Poorly Dressed BooksPrinting Office must go. If that office were charged with the duty of furnishing free textbooks, there would be less incentive to keep its work up to a decent standard than at present. For so long as parents pay directly for textbooks, they will' have an active interest in the quality and cost of the books. But with textbooks furnished at public expense, this critical interest would be materially lessened. To the average man there is a big difference between the misappropriation of a dollar that comes out of his pocket and one that comes out of the public purse. The fierce indignation throughout the State at the shameful mismanage ment of the State Printing Office is due in considerable measure to a real ization of personal loss. Why do we hear so much discussion of the cost of textbooks? On its face it seems strange, when we consider that of all the money spent annually in California for education, not more than four per cent goes for textbooks. And yet ninety-six per cent of all the talk concerns the four per cent spent for books! Why? Because the ninety six per cent is raised by taxation, while the four per cent is paid directly from our own individual pockets. Furnish textbooks at public expense, and we shall hear no more criticism of the cost of textbooks than of buildings, desks, supplies and teachers' salaries.Is it not clear that before we may safely lessen the public scrutiny by the introduction of free texts, we should reject a plan that has proved conducive of poor books at high prices? Before committing ourselves to free textbooks, we should evolve a plan that will safeguard the securing at reasonable prices of good books, clearly printed and well bound. We believe that we should steadfastly resist free textbooks in California until the State Printing Office is done away with.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.