Presents a fictionalized account illustrating the process by which willful states, misguided experts, cunning marketeers, and overworked teachers and administrators produce textbooks that are ill-written, confusing, misleading, and boring. (BJV)

Publishers are compelled by public policies and practices to produce textbooks that confuse students with non sequiturs, mislead them with misinformation, and bore them with pointlessly arid writing. Recommendations for textbook policy are proposed. (BJV)

For newly independent Central Asian republics a debate has arisen about how much of the aims, content and pedagogy of old Soviet-era curricula to retain, how much to revise or replace, and with what. There is a need to replace and revise textbooks, which are wearing out and outdated. Financial crisis has made the financial support of external…