Dear Editor,
Liberal Studies has become a core subject in NSS. There has been much controversy over the use of textbooks in this subject. I am writing to express my view on this issue.
There are always advantages of using textbooks, especially while a new subject is introduced. Having a newly designed syllabus, Liberal Studies is a ‘stranger’ to teachers and all students. Textbooks provide authority and guidance for the greenhorns. Apart from that, there are some concepts and technical terms that students should know. In some modules, textbooks supply a lot of data, graphs and factual information which would otherwise take teachers a lot of time to prepare. Textbooks are convenient tools for both teachers and students.
However, there are disadvantages of using textbooks. Firstly, the cost of buying the whole set of Liberal Studies textbooks is very high. It costs nearly $1000 for purchasing textbooks of all six modules. The most important thing is that the issues studied by students in Liberal Studies are indeed evolving and ever-changing. The news examples given in the textbooks are no longer updated when they are discussed in lessons because the textbooks may be published a few years before we use them.
Textbooks set boundaries for acquiring knowledge which should not be limited to any extend. Using textbooks as the main teaching materials will not enable students to learn comprehensively as they may stick to the principals stubbornly without trying to put what has been learnt into practice. Students have to know what the outside world is happening. That textbooks contain only historical facts cannot help.
Liberal Studies aims to provide pupils with a wide range of perspectives. Liberal Studies has got the meaning of ‘learning and knowing everything’ when translated into Chinese. With textbooks as our main teaching materials, we definitely cannot achieve this goal.
I would not deny that some important theories are systematically presented in textbooks, and students need to study them in order to enrich what they learn in Liberal Studies. Both the ideas of no-textbooks and mainly using textbooks are not good enough for students to achieve the best results of learning.
To conclude, I would say that the best way to study Liberal Studies is that schools should treat textbooks as reference books, while updated sources as the object of studying.
Yours faithfully,
Chris Wong
Chris Wong