"Textbooks can be great reference tools when a student is researching an unfamiliar topic, but most students never fully engage with a topic if they use only textbooks. All the interesting questions have already been asked and answered for the student by someone else. These days it is rare for a student to identify a textbook that was formative in developing great habits of research, reading, and recitation. Textbooks are structured differently than they were before the 1950s. A well-organized textbook can show students how to determine their own outline for a systematic study of a subject, but contemporary textbooks are not used in that way. Today texts are like nannies, holding your hand each step of the way—as though the authors think they have to tell the student and teacher what to do on Mondays at 9:37 A.M.—rather than as a point to begin more intensive studies. The proliferation of textbooks in schools is testimony to the misguided belief that children are unwilling to struggle with ideas and want all their work done for them and placed in a single source."