Richard Feynman on the textbook review process

My wife's post about how poor public school textbooks are reminded me of Richard Feynman's account of reviewing textbooks for the State of California.

Before reading the account it helps to know who is Richard Feynman. Briefly he was a very accomplished physicist. He is one of the top names in physics. As his section in Wikipedia says Feynman is known for "expanding greatly on the theory of quantum electrodynamics, particle theory, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium."

And to have the full context for understanding his account of the textbook review process it helps to know that Richard Feynman was also well known for his ability to teach physics. He had that rare gift of being able to understand hard, complex ideas, and then teaching them in such a way that others could comprehend the concepts and principles.

In his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! he wrote a chapter on evaluating school textbooks. His account is well written and it is worth reading the whole chapter. Here are a few snippets:

Richard Feynman wrote about how he would get so angry when reading the books. "The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous -- they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child."

After Richard Feynman plowed through various books he would go to committee meetings to evaluate and rate the books. Richard found out that sometimes he was the only one who read the books. In fact a blank book had gotten a high rating by a number of committee members.

He recieved a lot of attention from book publishers. They would offer him gifts. For example he said: "Another thing like this happened when one of the publishers sent me a leather briefcase with my name nicely written in gold on it. I gave them the same stuff: 'I can't accept it; I'm judging some of the books you're publishing. I don't think you understand that!'"


I read this account several years ago. When I went to Google to find it again, I found it on The Textbook League's web site. At the end of the chapter the TextbookLeague has a postscript, here is part:

"We don't know of any other case in which state functionaries have given high marks to a book whose pages were blank, but all the other follies and outrages described in Feynman's narrative are familiar."
"During the past ten years we have studied adoptions operated by state agencies in California and elsewhere, and we have seen -- again and again -- the same practices that Feynman observed in 1964. As a rule, state textbook-adoption proceedings are bureaucratic shams. As a rule, the evaluation committees assembled by state agencies are manifestly unqualified to appraise textbooks or to render any meaningful advice."

and later the postscript says:

"If a state agency really wanted to obtain legitimate evaluations of textbooks, the agency could achieve this by using a process that is very well known: Send each book to a knowledgeable reviewer who will appraise it, who will write a report to set forth and explain his appraisal, and who will sign his name to his report. This is the process employed by the book-review editors of newspapers, magazines and professional journals throughout the land. It works, and it can be repeated to any desired extent: To obtain several appraisals of a given book, simply send the book to several reviewers."
"As a rule, however, state agencies don't want legitimate evaluations of the textbooks that publishers submit for adoption, because the agencies are allied with the publishers. "


When you hear in the news about again the decline in American public schools, remember at least part of the problem is the process by which the textbooks are selected.


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