Edume: Do We Blame Textbook ?

Do we blame textbook by Ray Tan 

It rains heavily today when I was wide awake at 6.20 a.m. As usual, I'd browse my favorite websites with Morning Coffee. This is no ordinary coffee you find in Starbuck or Coffee Bean; it is a Firefox add-on which allows you to save a bunch of websites you read everyday and launch at the click of a single button. I think our cover this add-on in the future. As I was browsing some of the websites, there is one with the title "Judging Books by Their Covers". In the article, Mr. Richard Feynman told the story about corruption in textbook adoption when he was invited to join the State Curriculum Commission in California. The commission is responsible to review and select textbooks for the younger generation. During his time with the commission, he was approached by representatives who were enthusiastic to "sell" him their textbooks.

However, their effort was deemed useless because he refused to listen to these "salesmen", instead he was determined to go through all the textbooks by himself. Most of the textbooks did not meet his expectation. He was disappointed by all those books as in his own words, "They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child."You can read the rest of the article here which is an excerpt from the autobiography of Richard Feynman. 

I think our country really need an expert with the caliber of a man like Mr. Richard Feynman. Authors of textbooks are not perfect and they have little experience with the application aspect of their teaching. For example, a Chemistry writer can write all about Mass Spectrometer but, how many times does he or she get to use one ? An experience chemist would provide a better insight on how the information should be relayed to the students. Besides that, I think all of us would agree that tone and style at which the information is presented in our textbooks is rather dull and obtuse. That is the reason most students fallback to reference books like Pelangi, Oxford Fajar or Longman as their primary reference and discarding our text books aside. A textbook should be designed to be the primary resources for all students, while reference books are only used as supplementary reading.

I have seen  foreign book like Fundamental of Physic which present their information with a very interesting story and relationship with our daily activities. At first some might be astounded by the size of the book, but behind the gigantic size it contains a lot of information. More importantly, the book cultivates interest and stimulates curiosity of every student to learn. I am not saying all foreign books are better than local books, but they certainly did a great job in relaying information and attracting my attention. 

What do you think can we do to turn the table around ?