Learning and Saving by Using the Newspaper

Lately, much hand-wringing has taken place over the excessive and growing cost of textbooks. Coincidentally, the personal cost of higher education has grown much faster than the rate of inflation. For example, in the 1950s when I was an undergraduate at UCLA, there was no tuition and the so-called incidental fee was $45 a semester.

One textbook giant, wincing at the current outcry, has reacted by reducing the bells and whistles (color spreads, photos) of some of its offerings and, in so doing, is reducing the wholesale price of those texts 75%. Should one wonder at the amount of fat in the price?

Many instructors, and I am one, make no use of the non-text additions, which seem to imply students cannot concentrate or focus on the information itself, needing the stimulation of MTV-style illustrations to hold their attention. Another gripe has been the infinitesimal amount of actual change from one edition to the next. Some college bookstores collude in gouging students by not making available used previous editions.

What can teachers and students do? Before textbooks there was text, material written and published but not collected by editors. These are still available. They are called “trade books.” Three or four trade books by the original authors often do not cost as much as one glossy textbook.

Only laziness among instructors or book committees prevents them from reading and selecting from these original sources. For the liberal arts -- history, political science and composition, for example -- cheap paperbacks are readily available. These subjects all must encourage the student’s need for (and lack of) critical thinking.

In my classes, I use that most superior text of all: the newspaper. As an athlete or musician improves only by practice, so does the ability to read critically.

In nearly 50 years teaching at Los Angeles City College, I have seen the population change from nearly all lower-division, university-bound students to a student body with little or no background in the common language. But what the better-prepared student and the minimally prepared have in common is an inability to evaluate, compare and contrast ideas and philosophies.

The newspaper fulfills that need. There is news. There is commentary -- both signed and unsigned and opinions from readers. It is a free marketplace of ideas. It is current. It is relevant as no overstuffed and overpriced textbook can ever be.

Of course, use of the newspaper as text requires constant diligence and intelligent reading and sifting by the instructor -- reading it every day, finding ways to correlate it to the curriculum. For the growing mass of remedial students, graphic stories on the comics pages provide a rich source of colloquial language, metaphor and jokes.

If possible, every instructor should make use of the newspaper and trade books to fight the insulting condescension of bloated textbook publishers.

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Sam A. Eisenstein is a professor of English at Los Angeles City College.