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For ten school years prior to my retirement, I taught English grammar, literature and composition classes at a private school in Columbus, Ohio. My students ranged from seventh through twelfth grades.

Our school deliberately purchased used textbooks and used them as long as possible in order to keep tuition costs affordable for the families who sent their children to our school. Although we purchased some books new each school year, most of our books were used.

Some might argue that the value of used textbooks is questionable considering the fact that the body of knowledge in any given subject is constantly changing demanding revision of textbooks. Of course, knowledge does change and textbooks do need revising. However, such revisions are often promoted by book publishers who do, after all, have an interest in selling new books to school systems every year.

The English literature textbooks I used in teaching my classes were several years old, but they contained American and English classical literature that never changes. When my students studied Shakespeare's "Macbeth," for instance, it did not matter how old the textbook was. The same is true of the poetry of Emily Dickinson or the musings of Mark Twain. Classical literature is not open to revision; it stands or falls just as it was originally published.

Because grammar rules do sometimes change (consider the comma as an example; rules now call for fewer commas than once were thought necessary) we used consumable grammar textbooks that our students purchased new each year and which were revised as necessary by the publishers. These were not hard bound permanent books, but rather were soft bound workbooks in which the students could write their exercises.

In some subjects there may be a need for new textbooks on a regular basis, but probably not every year, especially at the junior high and high school level. College textbooks may be a different matter, but even there, costs could be contained by using new textbooks only every other year or every third year.

With the rapid availability of information retrieval via the Internet, instructors are able to keep up with changes in their field of instruction with relative ease. These changes can be passed on to their students during regular classroom instruction. This is actually a much faster way of updating material than waiting for the publication of new textbooks which are always several months to a year or more behind current knowledge because of the time lag from revising to publishing to distributing textbooks.

Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, E-textbooks will be available for classroom use, in .pdf or some other appropriate format. Schools could pay a fee to the publisher in return for the right to download and print the books for students' use, eliminating the need for expensive hard bound textbooks all together. These would be more current at any given moment than traditional textbooks could ever be.

Learn more about this author, Tom Parsons.
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