Anyone who complains about the cost of textbooks hasn’t set foot in a bookshop for ages

At school, I am known for never getting angry (more out of resignation than kindness), but I am happy to make an exception when, every year, against the backdrop of the last summer sunsets, the traditional controversy over school textbooks resurfaces. From Mediterranean beach umbrellas to Alpine peaks, from mainstream radio stations to the most scathing editorials, there is a chorus of voices claiming that they cost too much, that it is a scandal, and that they place an unsustainable burden on the family budget. The controversy can be quelled with three simple words: it’s not true.

The first myth to dispel is that publishers alter certain details in textbooks – an image here, an exercise there, the size of the maps and perhaps the title on the cover – to force families to buy so-called ‘new’ books every year, which are in fact old ones that have been recycled. This is not true: to be clear, they do engage in such practices (spoiler: they are publishing houses, not charities), but this does not necessitate any repurchase, as there are restrictions preventing changes to the text during a school cycle. In practice, if a student purchases a history textbook in the third year of sixth form, they will continue using the subsequent volumes of that edition right through to their A-levels, while any new edition will be intended for the next cohort of third-year sixth formers. What this rather underhand ploy entails – though a necessary one, given that the school sector keeps a large part of the Italian publishing industry afloat – is, in fact, the impossibility of buying textbooks at half price from those who used them the previous year and wish to sell them on. Essentially, the publishers’ cunning tactics harm those who prefer an old, tattered and greasy book to a brand-new one all to themselves.

Let’s now move on to the second cliché: the cover price is too high. This is not true. Looking through lists of books to be adopted for the coming school year, I find, for example, philosophy textbooks priced at 29 euros – and we’re talking about volumes of around six hundred pages. If I buy a novel of a similar size in a bookshop, I spend slightly less; if I’m looking for a reference book of the same size, especially if it’s illustrated, the cost easily rises well above thirty euros. To assert that textbook cover prices are too high is effectively to acknowledge that one has not visited a bookshop for some time and, more importantly, to deny value not only to the work of those who produced the textbook but also to the very content it conveys—the usefulness of which, beyond the narrow aim of securing a good grade, is recognised by only a tiny minority. Right here beside me, I still keep the textbooks from my specialised subjects at sixth form, which would not look out of place in university lecture theatres and which I still open when a doubt or a question arises. The most expensive volume cost 58,500 lire (the current edition of the same book costs 43.90 euros): spread over thirty years of loyal service, that seems to me a reasonable sum.

This leads to the third cliché: textbooks cost a fortune and are useless; either teachers don’t use them, or students don’t use them. In this case, the issue is more complex. There are compulsory textbooks and non-compulsory textbooks. The former are those containing texts and exercises that are worked through in a targeted manner, and it is therefore necessary to have them in order to practise them. Non-mandatory textbooks, on the other hand, are interpretative and argumentative in nature (the standard philosophy textbook, for example, but also those on art or history) and aim to foster critical thinking by presenting a particular perspective that coexists alongside different ones: in this case, it is important to have any textbook at all, not necessarily the one adopted by the course – so much so that often, formally or informally, lecturers say that similar titles are also acceptable. I would be wary of a lecturer who knows only the textbook they are teaching from and who recites it, providing, rather than explanations, a service for the blind. Refusing to purchase the textbook because the teacher does not use it means failing to understand that, in order to do without it, one must first be familiar with many of them.

It is true, however, that the textbook has changed its purpose and, having been for generations of pupils a source of more or less pleasant afternoon exertion, now seems to have been reduced to a blueprint for preparing lessons: teachers study them – perhaps to fill in unacknowledged gaps in their own knowledge – rather than the pupils, who instead rely on shorthand notes from lessons, sometimes leading to misunderstandings of undoubted humour, or on the repetition of dreadful slides, if not directly on oral tradition. One of the reasons why we are a far more ignorant nation than we were some time ago is that we have decided that textbooks are an unnecessary expense. Why pay for a resource that we can make do without, albeit inadequately? The saving is immediate, but in the long run, ignorance costs more.