A friend who is an artist sent a link to a website that describes a new Pearson art history book that has no pictures! No pictures of the art it describes. Students are instructed to look for the images in another textbook.
The pictureless art history book costs $180.
You have to open the link and look at a page in the book.
Is it time to laugh or cry?
This is what the art students said about the art history book without pictures.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why sell students just one textbook when you can sell two?
Satire is impossible now.
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Well..well…well. You have to hand it to Pearson. A small fortune for blank paper bound up.
I guess I can sell my book “Ream” for the same amount. It consists of a ream of Xerox paper and a set of Crayola markers and a box of crayons.
Thanks for the laugh. It’s a nice way to end the week.
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Thirty years ago I was interviewed for my first elementary art teacher job. The principal asked me if I could teach art with no supplies. Of course I told him what he wanted to hear, I wanted the job! How much things have not changed!!
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One thing this offers is a look into the mind of the business world. Normal people typically would think: I make a good product. Sell it. Make a profit on the sale. Repeat.
The business world seems to add one more step before ‘Repeat’: Cheapen the product to the max. That additional step often intrudes on initial quality. But such is the norm on the corporate world, I guess.
Perhaps this is what makes corporations not ‘people’.
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Hell, you could charge students $200 for a one-page textbook, on any subject, that consisted of just one sentence: “Look it up for yourself.”
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I am constantly amazed by the foolishness and willingness to lie of those who promote ridiculous ideas like this… who comes up with these absurd ideas anyway? Of course the same thing happens on my own campus..my students are being required to purchase access to an online system to track their assessments under the ridiculous claim that is is a workbook or a textbook. Of course it has no content, no work to do, the students retain nothing from it and it is only used for program assessment. But we can make them pay for it because we called it a work book.
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I’m speechless.
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This is perfect, it has as much educational value as art, just like many of their other products. An educational test without anything educational in it. Maybe they could at least invest our pensions into this junk they buy, we might then get something out of it. No, then Pearson would go bankrupt so they would not have to pay us anything.
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Well, the emperor has no clothes! No, I mean, the art book has no pictures!
Really, Pearson, no sense in reinventing the color wheel. I was an Art Education major in the 70’s, and there’s no way any book publisher could improve upon Janson.
Get a lawyer, OCAD students!
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