‘Magazine’ Texts

Not only are school textbooks “inadequate” (“When the Lobbyists Throw a Learning Curve,” by Diane Ravitch, Opinion, July 16), they are totally antiquated in their present form.

I propose a completely new approach to public school textbooks that will lower their cost, stimulate greater interest by students and teachers in the subject taught, and promote an individual student response to the material: magazine-like textbooks that are each pupil’s to keep.

Many adults, including myself, find glossy magazines irresistible: exciting pictures, up-to-date information, a large variety of styles and subjects between any pair of covers, and freedom to underline and highlight text to our heart’s content--and it’s all quite affordable. The magazines we read represent virtually all primary and secondary school subjects: history, politics, literature, science, health, art--you name it. Even math, in a colorful magazine-like format, should be less forbidding.

Textbooks that read and look like modern magazines would turn fewer youngsters off to learning, and might implant a magazine-reading habit in many who otherwise would grow up to become non-readers.

GREGORY WRIGHT

Encino