SchlagerBlog

It’s an exciting time at the intersection of publishing and history education. On the publishing side, the change is coming fast and furious. Rarely a day goes by without some new announcement or reporting. Here are a few from the past month:

• Blackboard’s Bid to Galvanize E-Texts
• CourseSmart Partners with Select Higher Education Institutions to Provide Instant Access to eTextbooks
• iPad Goes Under the Gauntlet at Universities This Fall
• E-Education Inc. Seeks the Mainstream

Across the Twitterverse, on the blogs of publishing insiders, in press releases, talk of the upheaval in educational publishing is everywhere. The reasons are not a surprise to anyone: the arrival of sophisticated e-readers (not to mention mobile phones) capable of serving students;  the outdated–some would say “broken”–model of traditional textbook publishing, with companies constantly pushing out new editions to try to salvage profits in the face of the thriving used textbook market; the huge expense of that same market, and the push from state governments and students/parents alike to find more affordable options.

On the education side, these same forces are converging to produce a similar wave of change. Teachers are calling for paperless classrooms, integrating Web technologies into their classrooms in remarkable and exciting ways, and making plans to jettison their textbooks altogether. History educators have been at the forefront of these efforts, in part because the teaching of history lends itself well to an alternative model: instead of a textbook, educators can rely on primary sources and free Web resources, a scenario described nicely in this long post by Nate Kogan at his blog, “The History Channel This Is Not.”

All of this leaves me–the publisher of document-based learning tools for history students–to wonder: Is the revolution upon us? Is this really the end of the textbook as we know it? Will the traditional paper textbook disappear entirely, or will it find new life in electronic form over the coming years? Will the movement to ditch textbooks for various online alternatives become widespread or will it remain the province of an elite corps of tech-savvy educators?

My opinion is that the revolution is real, and that printed textbooks will indeed largely go away. However, I suspect that the “traditional” textbook will reappear in pretty much its current form, albeit electronically, because the dominant textbook publishers have such clout and such a strong legacy that they will be successful at convincing  school districts and university professors alike to switch to e-versions of the same textbooks they’ve been using all these years. I do think, however, that there will continue to be a subset of educators at both the high school and undergraduate levels who ditch their textbooks altogether and use alternative tools to teach history.

Now, what about Schlager Group? We obviously have a dog in this fight, and in fact this fall we will launch a new version of MilestoneDocuments.com, one that operates entirely on a subscription model for students and teachers. We think our new site can, in fact, be just the kind of alternative option that will appeal to those history educators who are most interested in leaving their textbooks behind, or at the very least augmenting them with a document-based learning approach that is built on Web 2.0 technologies. (If you are a teacher at the high school or college level and would like to sign up for a free trial once our site launches, e-mail me.)

Regardless of how successful our new site is, one thing I do know is that the pace of change wrought by all of this technology won’t slow down anytime soon. The hardware and software options will continue to evolve, students (and teachers) will become increasingly comfortable with using mobile devices, and budget pressures will continue to crack open the traditional textbook market. As a result, we see our new site as the next evolutionary step in our product line, but almost certainly not the last. Where will all of this lead us–publishers, educators, students, parents–in the next several years? I, for one, can’t wait to find out.

I have just finished reading part 2 of William Manchester’s famous biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion: Alone, 1932-1940. As the subtitle suggests, it covers the years leading up to Britain’s involvement in World War I. These were years when Churchill was a political has-been, a powerless MP who was virtually the sole voice arguing that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany could not be negotiated with, that Britain needed to shore up its defenses and military forces quickly, that his country faced a grave danger. By the time the book closes, Churchill has just become prime minister, Germany has declared war on Britain, and the country’s battle for survival has been truly joined.

It’s a terrific book, popular history at its best: witty, engrossing, page-turning. I’ve read plenty about this period in the past, but still I learned a lot that was new to me. For instance, I don’t think I had ever quite realized just how widespread the appeaser viewpoint and policies were among the political and cultural establishment (including the press), and how lengthy the capitulation to Nazi Germany’s repeated aggressions and power-grabs.

As for Churchill himself, I learned much that I hadn’t known, including one huge surprise: He supported himself in these years by working as a freelance writer! His high profile, long experience, and literary gifts made him a sought-after newspaper columnist in the 1930s, and he also toiled away at large-scale book projects, including a massive historical reference work, the 4-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He wrote prolifically, partly because he wanted to, but partly because he had to earn money to support his lavish lifestyle and costly country estate, Chartwell. Manchester recounts how Churchill did most of his writing late at night, after saying goodnight to his usual assortment of dinner guests. His secretaries and researchers would stay up to assist him into the wee hours of the morning. Amazingly–in part because he needed the money–he worked this way even after he joined the War Cabinet of Neville Chamberlain and was beset by duties and responsibilities on all sides.

Chamberlain’s writing prowess got me to thinking about some great American leaders who could wield a wicked pen. Two that come to mind are Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.  The entry on Roosevelt in Milestone Documents in American Leaders shows that he was as prolific in his own way as was Churchill:

Notwithstanding a multitude of grand accomplishments in the realm of public service, a very active family life, a variety of recreational passions, and truly voluminous reading, Roosevelt astonishingly managed over a relatively short lifespan to write approximately thirty books, many hundreds of articles and speeches, and more than one hundred thousand letters.

Among these was a four-volume history of the American frontier from 1769 to 1807, The Winning of the West. (Note, you can download the entire 4-volume set for free to your Kindle, and possibly in other ebook stores as well.) In other words, like Churchill after him, Roosevelt managed to create his own multivolume history reference sets.

In today’s world, it’s almost inconceivable that any president will end up producing the kind of voluminous writings that a Churchill or Roosevelt did. Heck, I’m in the publishing business, and even I can’t imagine taking the time to write a huge reference work all by myself, despite the fact that my life is nowhere as busy as those of the great statesmen of the past. Of course, like so many modern workers, I write all day, every day: emails, instant messages, blog posts, Twitter posts, Facebook updates, etc. But most of those won’t be saved (thank goodness), and that output will likely never result in the kind of sustained body of work that we saw from previous generations.

Do you think we will ever again see a president or prime minister who produces a vast output of long-form writing? If not, will civilization be the worse for it? One thing that Manchester points out when describing Churchill writing feverishly about Oliver Cromwell or the Norman conquest while juggling critical decisions about how to thwart the German war machine is that Churchill’s literary work was not a distraction from his day-to-day responsibilities. Rather, studying and writing about those historical events helped him to clarify his perspective about contemporary matters. It may be that devoting oneself to the exhausting work of writing about something is, in the end, more useful than merely reading about it. If so, then indeed it may be our collective loss that our political leaders no longer write about history.

At some point in 1619 or 1620 (the date question arises because of England’s use at the time of the Julian calendar), John Rolfe, an Englishman who had ventured to the Virginia colony (and who married a young native woman known as Pocahontas), wrote a letter to Sir Edwin Sandys in which he mentioned the arrival of blacks to the colony:

“He brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Merchant bought for victuals (whereof he was in great need as he pretended) at the best and easiest rate they could.”

These “20 and odd Negroes,” all black Africans, were indentured servants, not slaves. But their mention in Rolfe’s letter is significant, because it represents the first documented case of Africans sold into servitude in British North America. Some 400 years later, an African American would be elected president of the United States.

This 400-year history is chronicled in fascinating form in our newly published reference set, Milestone Documents in African American History, which is arriving in libraries around the country this week. The 4-volume set opens with the full text and in-depth expert analysis of Rolfe’s letter, and it ends with several documents from the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, including a 2009 U.S. Senate resolution apologizing for the “enslavement and racial segregation of African Americans.” In between are some 125 other primary sources that serve as a documentary history of African Americans and remind us that, in the end, the great sweep of African American history IS American history. To give you just a taste of what I mean, consider some of the documents the set explores:

• Slavery Clauses in the U.S. Constitution
• United States v. Amistad
• Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?”
• Emancipation Proclamation
• Ku Klux Klan Act
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s “Lynch Law in America”
• W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk
• Walter F. White: “The Eruption of Tulsa”
• Alain Locke’s “Enter the New Negro”
• Marian Anderson’s My Lord, What a Morning
• Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I Have a Dream”
• Stokely Carmichael’s “Black Power”
• Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Panel
• Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March Pledge
• Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address

The Constitution, slavery, emancipation and the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, lynching, the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, black power, scientific discrimination, economic disparity, 21st-century presidential politics–it’s all here, in compelling documentary form and analyzed and explained by a wonderful team of some 65 historians.

Like all sets in our “Milestone Documents” series, this one is a great value: purchase of the print set brings free access for an entire school or library to the same content online via Salem History. We hope African American History will be greeted with the same positive reception as the previous three sets in the series: American History (multiple-award winner), American Leaders (ditto), and World History (called an “essential purchase” in a starred Library Journal review just hitting stands today). If you are a librarian or educator, I hope you’ll consider buying the set for your institution.

As we knew it would, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) last week approved new standards for the state’s social studies curriculum. I am hardly alone in lamenting a blatantly ideological process designed to influence what Texas kids learn for the next decade. (Here’s another good post. Also see the #savehistory hashtag for recent tweets on this subject.) It’s obvious that the board members who voted for the changes sought to imprint their side of today’s conservative/liberal culture clashes on the next generation of kids. I am embarrassed and ashamed of our state, and I say that as the owner of the kind of 21st-century, information industry small business that Texas tries so hard to attract.

In my last post on this subject, I wrote that this battle over textbooks obscured some bigger problems in public education in the state. In a comment to the post, Ed Darrell, fairly enough,  took me to task for not taking a formal stand against the SBOE’s efforts. Few people have done more than Ed to fight the good fight against the SBOE’s politicization of Texas science and social science standards. Even though it’s obvious that no comment by me would have stopped the passage of these new standards, I take Ed’s criticism seriously. But the question now becomes: what now? How do those of us who disagree with the new standards–educators and publishers alike–respond in such a way to influence what and how our kids learn in this new environment?

One way, perhaps the chief one, is to follow a nascent trend that is already at work among influential educators around the country: deemphasize the textbook and move toward a document-based, inquiry-based system of learning. Let the kids examine primary sources of all sorts, construct their own questions about how to think about past events, and work toward their own conclusions. If the SBOE thinks that Joseph McCarthy has gotten a raw deal from historians (and cursed “liberal textbooks”), then let kids examine the documentary evidence themselves, from all sides. There are so many primary sources now available on the Web, and so many interesting sites and engaging tools, that this would be the right choice even if there were no political shackles being placed upon teachers and kids by an irresponsible SBOE. It’s simply a better and more effective way to teach and learn history.

So, as a publisher of history education materials, we are asking ourselves the obvious related question: How do we provide tools and materials to support this new form of history education? With MilestoneDocuments.com, we have only begun to answer the question. We’ve gathered, culled, curated, and analyzed a range of primary sources from US and world history (yes, including SBOE pet subjects from cultural conservatives), and our various teacher’s activities and study questions for students all emphasize a “compare/contrast” style of learning. Later this summer we’ll be rolling out new teaching tools for history educators at our site. But in general, we are thinking day and night about where we go from here, and we couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities and challenges in front of us.

Now, I know that it’s naive to think that the traditional top-down textbook/lecture environment is going to end anytime soon. Most public schools in Texas (and elsewhere) will continue to use this teaching style for the foreseeable future.  The damage done by the SBOE is real, and its impact on our kids will be felt. Nonetheless, we have to find ways to minimize this damage, and I am optimistic that the changes already happening in history education can do just that.

Are there other ways that you see to prevent partisan intrusion in educational standards, whether it’s from the right or the left? I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve decided to formalize a trend that has begun to dominate my (all-too-frequent) blog posts. Rather than writing about reference industry news and issues, I have been increasingly focused on education and classroom items, especially as they relate to using technology in the classroom. As a result, the new subtitle for this blog: “History. Education. Technology.” won’t surprise any of you. You will also notice some new links in the blogroll.

This evolution mirrors what is happening in our company. While our foundation and core have been in reference publishing, we are increasingly devoting time and energy to educational publishing via our Milestone Documents website. How do we help history educators teach? How do we help students learn? What new tools can we provide to improve history education and to assist the community of passionate teachers and historians? These are the questions that are occupying more and more of our time at Schlager Group, so it’s only natural that they should find their way into my blog posts.

A key word here is “technology.” Just as educators at all levels are struggling to figure out how to integrate technology tools into the classroom to enrich and improve the learning experience, we at Schlager Group are working hard to figure out how to adopt and deploy many of these same technologies in order to serve history teachers and students. This is no easy task. Like so many publishing companies, ours was built on a love of content, and it has been staffed by humanities grads who are steeped in the finest editorial tradition. This has allowed us to turn out award-winning materials of which we are rightly proud. At the same time, however, we have lacked the technical chops to properly position ourselves for the publishing revolution that is in full swing all around us.

To solve this problem, we have sought the expertise of others who can lead us into the future. These include Vector Media Group,  which has built a wonderful new platform for MilestoneDocuments.com and is helping us to refine our vision for the site even now. They also include River Valley Technologies, which has a long tradition in the scholarly journal marketplace but is now branching out to assist us in myriad ways. The company is based in India, but its director, Kaveh Bazargan, is based in the U.K. (I have seen the image of the bald, jet-setting publishing executive, and it isn’t me.) Through associations like these, we are fine-tuning, redirecting, and even revolutionizing our vision for our future.

That’s not to say that we have turned our back on the reference universe or the libraries and librarians that we love so much. Far from it. Even now, we are just days away from the publication of our next multivolume reference set, Milestone Documents in African American History, and deep in the trenches of producing a new set for the fall, Milestone Documents of World Religions. Like so many publishing companies, we are finding that we must operate in many spheres, and on many platforms, at once.

I do hope to write more frequent (and more interesting) blog posts, although I’m sure many of you have read that same sentiment on more blogs than you can count. It shouldn’t be difficult, given how many interesting things are happening at the intersection of history, education, and technology.

Today, for a brief moment, I considered making a public comment to the Texas State Board of Education about their proposed social studies curriculum changes, which will presumably be voted on in May. After all, as the owner of a Dallas-based small business that publishes educational materials for history students and teachers, I have a vested interest in these changes for a number of reasons. I care about the history that gets taught to our kids. I care about efforts to politicize teaching standards. And, let’s be blunt: as a CEO engaged in the capitalist free-enterprise pursuit of profit, I have to make sure that our publishing efforts correlate to the social studies standards of a huge state like Texas. That would be true even if we weren’t based in Texas.

However, the urge passed quickly. As I considered posting a public comment to the SBOE, I realized that not only would any such comment be made in vain (the SBOE certainly isn’t going to listen to someone like me on this matter; my company is far too small and inconsequential for me to make a dent in the cacophony surrounding this debate), but more importantly I realized that the battle obscures a larger problem: our public school system–and our society–is failing miserably to adequately equip our students for the future.

Let’s take one example of the proposed amendments to the standards, the one that wants to make sure high school students are able to “describe the causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.” Now, frankly, I think this is a ridiculous addition. While the so-called conservative resurgence is interesting from a political standpoint, I hardly think it’s as important as the committee seems to think. That said, does requiring students to learn about these items do them harm? No, in fact, I don’t. Will learning about the conservative revolution indoctrinate our kids and turn out generations of George W. Bush-loving, National Review-reading patriots? Don’t make me laugh. That may well be the ultimate goal of the committee, but any such effort is doomed to failure in our open, information-overloaded, Internet-era society. Texas students learning under these standards are no more likely to worship at the throne of Phyllis Schafly than they are to swear eternal allegiance to Malcolm X or Mao Zedong.

But more than this, I think the debate obscures the true educational crisis in our society. When the dropout rate is above 30% (well more than 50% in poor, big-city schools in places like Dallas), what difference do a few items in a 42-page list of standards make? By almost every standard, our high schools are being outperformed by those in virtually every other industrialized country. Our system is tied to the past, built to turn out generically educated kids for a 19th-century agricultural society.

I suppose it’s a truism that older generations think standards were tougher when they were growing up, that kids learned more. Still, my own anecdotal evidence leads me to that same conclusion, flawed though it probably is. When we hire entry-level editors just out of college, we often get hundreds of recent graduates applying for a single position. We pick the cream of the crop to interview, and as part of that process we give them a brief exam to test their knowledge of history and current events. The results are always shocking, in a bad way.

Plenty of observers have noted that the hue and cry about Texas history standards influencing the rest of the country because of the state’s pull with textbook publishers is probably overblown. Others have argued that changes in the current era, textbooks are becoming less and less important. I agree with both positions.

Thus, while I lament the stupid political games that the SBOE is playing, I think we’ve taken our eye off the larger picture. We have bigger fish to fry.

After a lengthy development process (is there any other kind?), we have finally launched version 2.0 of our MilestoneDocuments.com site. Over at the new site, you can read a welcome message from me that explains what the revamp is all about, the new content readers will find, and so forth.

When we released version 1.0 of the site about 18 months ago, I wrote here that the endeavor was admittedly an experiment. We wanted to see what kind of traffic we could draw, and what kind of per-article sales we could ring up, with a Web site built around our encyclopedia content but aimed squarely at students and teachers rather than librarians. That first version was indeed an experiment, and it looked it. It was hardly a design for the ages. Nonetheless, we learned a lot with that first incarnation, enough to make us want to invest in a more serious and robust iteration.

During the intervening 18 months, of course, the content industry–by which I mean book publishing, library reference publishing, Web publishing, textbook publishing, et al.–has been going through major upheavals, and there is no end in sight. As you would expect, we built the new site with many of these upheavals in mind, e.g. social media integration and a more nuanced treatment of the free/premium content mix that we are offering. At the same time, though, our eyes are still very much on the future, in the sense that more than anything, we see the site as a platform on which to launch future products aimed at students and teachers. Thus, expect to see further iterations as the educational publishing environment continues to change and as we continue to work on building new relationships with our audience.

But enough with the “vision thing.” I hope you will take a look at the new site and browse what we think is a pretty large amount of terrific content.

I’m pleased to announce the publication today of Milestone Documents in World History, the latest installment in our Milestone Documents series of reference sets. This 4-volume, 1,900-page set covers 125 essential primary documents from ancient history to the present. As with all of our Milestone Documents sets, the entries here combine the full text of the document with an in-depth, analytical essay by a historian that places the document in its historical context, explains what the text says and means, and describes the impact. If you want to see an example from the set, read our entry on the Haiti Constitution of 1801.

We’ve heard many times from librarians and history teachers alike how difficult it is to find good, authoritative resources on world history, so we think our new set will find a warm welcome in libraries around the country, whether they are school, public, or academic ones. Also, once again we offer a complete set of teacher activity guides for educators who are using the set; these are correlated to the National Standards for World History.

Finally, remember that all of our sets come with free online access (via Salem History) for an entire school or campus, and that access includes remote access from a student’s dorm room or home. As ever, it’s the best deal in reference publishing. If you want to order the set, just visit Salem’s Web site or call toll-free 1-800-221-1592.

I’m happy to announce that we have lowered the prices for most of our iPhone and iPod Touch applications. Our Lincoln and Obama apps are now just $.99, and our Presidential Speeches–Pro app is now only $4.99, an incredible bargain for an app that includes 90 famous presidential speeches in history PLUS our award-winning document analysis. For any social studies teachers whose classrooms have iPod Touches, I hope you’ll check out our apps and consider using them in the classroom. Our apps include the full text of important document texts, plus glossaries that define strange/unfamiliar references. And, of course, the 3 apps listed here also contain our expert analysis of each document.

We do still have a few more apps to launch later this year, probably in the fall. Chief among them will be our Supreme Court documents app, which we hope think will be a terrifically useful tool for teachers and students and a fun app for history buffs.

Last week several of us were lamenting how we never dress up any more; our office dress is always casual, since we don’t receive customers and rarely meet clients or partners. And then it came to us: why not institute a formal day at the office? Thus was born Formal Friday at Schlager Group. I think it’s funny and warped and appropriately off-beat. Our only advantage as a small company is to be nimble and flexible and able to turn on a dime. And that can extend to the way we dress, no?

In any case, here is a photo from our first Formal Friday. Our two offsite employees and our interns are missing, but the rest of the gang is here. Three guesses which one is the middle-aged male boss.