There is no excuse for these 1,152 page textbooks.

History can be a weapon, and it can be used against you.

What gets lost in the textbook is the overall narrative. It gets lost in all the boxes and all the photos and all the little stuff that's stuck in all the time.

Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.

I've been in towns where there is no library, or where the library for the high school and the library for the town is one room, and it's smaller than my modest living room here. So you don't have many resources in 1950 or even 1970. This is the year, 2013, every town in America is connected to the web. Every town in America is therefore connected to all kinds of resources at the Library of Congress, at 100,000 websites.

Teachers need to teach the subject rather than to teach the textbook.

All of the common core standards stuff about critical reading and critical thinking and so on can only be positive.