by Jon Lackman | 26 June 2006 | Books, Teaching
John Paoletti’s February CAA talk on textbooks is now available online: “I would like to propose a moratorium on all publication of general textbooks in the history of art … we don’t seem to be willing to let the textbooks catch up with our innovations in teaching. Classrooms without a textbook would demand both a certain degree of humility—we simply can’t do everything—and thus a confrontation with the question of what we can do with our own individual backgrounds, our institutions’ educational resources, our students’ needs and preparation … Does this suggestion threaten our positions as the only discipline that seeks to present the whole of Western culture or of world cultures in a single course? You bet. But if we present a severely limited view of these cultures, what are we presenting to our students but the very kind of sound byte that has completely undermined political discourse in this country and that is seriously eroding our fundamental concepts of democracy. Do we really want to reinforce such a model of intellectual vacuity in our students’ minds?”
