This article describes how people in some communities are becoming violent in their opposition to schools requiring masks for students and school personnel. What struck me though was the photograph accompanying the article. Notice how the middle school student is stooped over as he walks.
Anyone who has had children go through the American school system knows that a good feature is that the school districts provide students with textbooks so that they do not have to buy them themselves. This is no small factor since publishers charge very high prices for textbooks, especially science ones. But a bad feature is that these textbooks are becoming larger and larger, often because publishers, in an effort to justify high prices, keep adding extra features that, to my mind, just make them more glossy and bigger while adding very little value. The frequent proliferation of ‘new’ editions every two or three years also means that the second-hand market is undermined, further increasing the profits. The situation is even worse in colleges and I used to regularly castigate the sales representatives of the worst culprits who would come to my office to try to persuade me to assign their textbooks in my course, explaining why I would never do so unless they stopped their predatory practices.
But I digress.
What I really want to say is that middle and high school students have to lug their textbooks for multiple subjects back and forth from home to school each day because teachers in each subject would assign homework for which they needed the book at home and would also require them to have the textbook in class. This would result in them constantly carrying heavy backpacks around, which cannot be good for their growing bodies. These children are not army recruits at boot camp who need to learn how to carry heavy loads for long periods.
I remember when my daughter was in high school and taking what was called an ‘Advanced Placement’ course in physics. These are supposedly the equivalent of a first-year college course and, if they did well, could get them exempt from having to take it in college. (My opinion was that these high school AP courses were not equivalent to a good college-level course even though they often used the same textbook.) The students in her high school were assigned the same text as in my college course but theirs was a single, thick, hardcover, heavy book. As a college instructor, I had the same text except that I had ordered for myself the more expensive option where it was split up into five small paperbacks. I remember my daughter delightedly taking the appropriate light paperback with her, depending on where she was in the course, and her friends being so envious of her.
My point is that textbooks have become too damn heavy and students are expected to carry too many of them around.
… and the textbook problem could be solved by having a set in class. Except some districts are so poor they can’t afford to have a single set of updated books per student. Or well, have the book come in multiple individual sections, like the author’s version.
But it’s not just textbooks. In my son’s high school each student is assigned a laptop for the year, which the students need to lug around daily. At least laptops are becoming lighter.
Added bonus the textbooks can be digital.
I think the tag for the image didn’t get closed.
I see a broken image icon.
If I click on it, I get to:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2021/08/25/focus-on-the-backpack-not-the-mask/backpack-masks/
Which has a small image.
If I click on that, I get:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/files/2021/08/backpack-masks.jpg
Which is large enough to see clearly.
( I’ve seen this phenomenon before; I’m not sure why it happens )
They could all be on an ereader (or laptop)… But then some clever jackass would decide all the publishers should charge almost the same price as for a physical book, but you’d never actually own it. You’d just pay out the nose to rent it for a semester or two.
I also remember some teachers bounced all around one big textbook. It always felt kind of obnoxious because I never knew what was coming up next. I think I started to get into the good habit of reading ahead a little. Or at least skimming to see what was coming. I stopped that pretty quickly after a couple classes bounced all over. I remember quite a few classes with sizeable books whose material we barely touched. In college there were whole classes that we didn’t require books for. It really didn’t pay to buy them until after you got a syllabus in the first class, even though that sounds silly and backwards. My memories of school are 20-30 years out of date at this point, for prespective.
Sorry about the messed up image. I made an error.
I marveled at American university textbooks being so big already almost 30 years ago, when I encountered the phone book sized math and physics textbooks (for example Grossman’s Calculus and Gettys, Keller and Skove’s Physics, which I used and still have), which we used already then in Finland. Domestic textbooks tend to be much thinner and smaller as the market here is so small (the exception used to be the so-called Green Bibles, the enormous Finnish-language paper and pulping technology textbooks/handbooks from 1970s/1980s*).
The publishers here do make money from primary and secondary education textbooks, but AFAIK, the relatively few university level textbooks in Finnish are mostly made with no direct profit motive. Thus they tend to be fairly compact, to cut costs.
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* = Their English-language successor is a 19-part series of books starting around year 2000. The individual books are of reasonable size.
I teach science and barely use textbooks anymore. There is so much good material available online. I really do miss Adobe Flash, though -- I used a lot of simulations and animations which required it.
Another thing: US high schools are moving away from lockers (claiming students use them to keep drugs and other contraband), so students need to lug all books around to all classes of the day rather than just what they need for one class.
I was an adult in the 1990s, and I was saying that. Imagine kids being forced to endure this, and no empathy from teachers. I certainly got none from those at my college (“you can’t afford the textbook? drop the class”).
I was studying information systems, and the “new editions” were nothing more than the previous year’s books with chapters in different orders. Literally, the exact same text and questions, the only difference being page and chapter numbers.
I’ve heard of some colleges making PDFs available or even instructors with decency giving away their ebooks for free. Had today’s phone cameras existed in the 1990s, I would have shot entire books (or chapter by chapter) and taken only a phone.
That’s what I’ve done with online teaching, photographing every level of book I teach from and edited the photos into simple HTML pages, with textarea tags to do practice examples on screen. The other teachers have been wasting their time writing and editing powerpoints every day, doubling their workloads.
@10 Intransitive
I understand why they do it, but teachers complete disregard for copyright law has always offended my delicate sensibilities.
marner:
If it’s any consolation, you can’t copyright facts, only the ways an author expresses them (which ones you’ve chosen to collect together and how they’re presented in the work) as well as other non-factual things which may be part of the work too. So to the extent that your concerns may be about that sort of thing, authors and publishers have no right to those bits anyway. That’s not to dismiss the problem at all, but that is especially relevant in the case of something like a textbook.
It would be much better if the government itself published freely-available textbooks for use in public schools, instead of relying on purchases from private publishers and everything that entails. I know that, these days, there are a bunch of authors who have gone through all of the trouble to create and publish free textbooks in certain subject areas (along with exercise books or other resources). That’s nice, and those may be used too assuming they’re good texts, since there’s no need to reinvent the wheel as it were. But in any case, this is the government’s school system, so providing for it is its responsibility.
My kids are at an all day 8-4 comprehensive school that means they don’t have homework and can leave their stuff in class. It’s a great system, especially since homework* is next to useless when it comes to learning.
*There’s a few exceptions: You need to practise your vocabulary and occasionally you have to write a longer text
marner (#11) --
It is (or should be) only a copyright violation to distribute copies, the same as with music. If you’re copying from a paid item for solely for your own use on another device (photos on a phone instead of a book) a fair use argument stands up.
A group of students buying one book and sharing photos would be another matter, though as a broke student in college, I would have done it.
Marner
I’m of the opinion that Justice trumps Law. When the laws are written by the rich (through the businesses they own) for the benefit of the rich, and these laws are detrimental to the public good, then it is right and proper to violate those laws. I also have socialist leanings, and feel that property rights do not always outweigh public good, especially when dealing with intellectual property. Copyright law is currently oppressive, and textbook publishers unjustly gouge their customers, so it is not just acceptable, but good to “steal” their text and provide it for free to students. If they want the right to monopolize textbooks, then they have a moral duty to sell the books at a reasonable price. Most shoplifting and similar theft is due to a failure of society and the market, so the solution is to reform the system that makes such theft appealing or necessary, not to punish the thieves.
But after all these heroic efforts at civil disobedience, if that’s what we’re supposed to call it, do you see the rich being noticeably weakened by it? I see no signs of that. They’re just making ever larger profits with ever larger monopolies, and making even more laws and technologies to tighten their grip.
Meanwhile, it’s already the case that very few artists of any kind get a decent income from royalties. You are definitely cutting into that too, even if your intention was only to harm the wealthy print publishers, record labels, film studios, and so on. Do you honestly think that’s a public good?
What you should be aiming for is to create a fairer system that actually works for the ordinary folks who are actually producing all of this stuff that you want to consume. It can’t just be about taking advantage of the fact that piracy is relatively easy, while patting yourself on the back for supposedly punching up (while also punching down). If it’s doing anybody any good, it looks like it’s just good for you, but you’re not the whole public.
But we’re not talking about a capitalist in the sense of somebody who profits just by claiming ownership of some property (such as land, a company, etc.). Artists are workers who should be compensated fairly for their work. Our various technologies and systems of distribution/consumption do not generally allow for other methods of compensation. At least until we come up with something very different (no, not “the internet” or “bitcoin” or some such bullshit), we are all just stuck with using those systems.
It seems like this may just be confusion by the fact that the term “intellectual property” has the word “property” in it, but that’s really not useful information. Blame lawyers for their silly terms if you want. That’s totally fine with me.
It’s just that the actual situation in the world (workers being paid for the things they make) isn’t anything like the capitalist villains that this comparison is relying upon: a shareholder, a factory owner, a landlord, etc. The whole problem is that those kinds of assholes (1) get tons of income which by their own account is not payment for any work they did, and (2) they do this by exploiting the work of others. That’s not what artists are doing when they tell readers/audiences/etc. that they should be paid for the work that they did.
There’s no need for such a snide attitude. I’m not saying that copyright should be abolished or that everyone should pirate everything. I don’t actually pirate much media, and nothing owned by individual artists. That’s part of why I’m such a stickler for linking back to the original source whenever anything is reblogged. I whole heatedly agree that original artists and authors should be able to profit from their own work. The system should be changed to make sure that authors are properly compensated and consumers are not gouged. I think copyright should be non-transferable and automatically assigned to the original author, obviously expiring upon his death. If I were healthy enough I would very much like to be personally active in politics, so I could do more than just spout off on the internet. As it is, besides voting and writing to politicians, this is about all I can do.
I don’t care about punishing the capitalists, and there’s nothing heroic in piracy. Media piracy is not about sticking it to the big guys. It’s what is going to happen when media is priced such that it is unavailable to too many people. That’s why I compared it to poor people shoplifting necessities. As you indicated, this isn’t an abstract issue. Real people are effected, both artists (in this case, researchers and original authors) and consumers. Textbooks are pretty close to a necessity, and if a student cannot afford the textbook or if buying it is a real hardship, then pirating is just fine in my opinion. It isn’t for the purpose of achieving long-term change, and certainly not of hurting the rich. It’s for the purpose of the individual getting access to something that he needs but has been priced out of his reach. Instructors who distribute copyrighted material to their students are probably much more concerned about effectively teaching their students than performing an act of defiance. People have to survive under the current system, not just wait and fight for things to get better.
As for semantics, “means of production” includes distribution. Legally, texts, images, and recordings are considered property, as silly as it might seem. The ability to publish and distribute works is essential to profiting off of them, so publishing companies who own the exclusive right to disseminate works which are produced by others are no different than other exploitative capitalists. Socialist theory absolutely can be applied to intellectual property.
I was toying with the idea of going down o the local university library and pulling a sample of chemistry texts from maybe the 1960’s to the present and just weighing them. It could be interesting.
I just bought an intro text on Bayesian Statistics. It weighs a bit over 2kg.
@ 13 Giliell
Way back in the Middle Ages when I was in school, I cannot remember doing much homework and have often wonder of what purpose what most of today’s massive amounts of homework serves.
And I certainly never had a backpack.
ionopachys, #17:
What? My first question, I guess? I think it was appropriate, but I do appreciate your response a lot more.
That’s actually not obvious. For some historical perspective, the US’s first copyright law in 1790 set it at 14 years, which could be renewed for another 14.
I don’t think “punishment” is good for anything. But wouldn’t you prefer it if they were not fucking up all sorts of shit all over the world? I mean, what if those people had to get real jobs instead?
Glad that’s settled. Not trying to be snide or anything, but that is how parts of your first comment came across to me.
Well, okay…. Lots of things of things are going to happen, including lots of crimes. It’s not exactly clear what you think that’s supposed to suggest.
Very generally, it’s not as if consumers have some kind of a right to get whatever media they want, although some do act very entitled.
If we’re still talking specifically about textbooks, I already pointed out a very simple way to handle that, which we should’ve been doing all along: the government makes them for free. That doesn’t depend on random people deciding to break the law, because the government (and its laws) would actually be on their side for once. Sounds better to me.
(As an aside, since you’re concerned about prices, if we got rid of the capitalists who are profiting from practically everything that’s made, fair and sustainable prices could be lower than they currently are, for all sorts of media, not to mention all sorts of other stuff beyond just that. Still not about punishing anybody or whatever. It’s just a reasonable goal to have.)
Sure, and I wasn’t suggesting otherwise … pretty much what I was doing, actually. We can agree on that, as long as we’re not saying that it needs to be applied in such a way that an exploitative capitalist publisher with IP is basically the same thing as an artist with IP. Because they’re not. That’s the sort of position that I was aiming my objection at before. (And if that doesn’t sound like your position, that’s great.)
Me: “Lots of things of things are going to happen”
I only meant to say “lots of things.” But I guess it’s true that lots of things of things are going happen too.