So our own unit and course designs must help students see that statements
in textbooks, as helpful as they often are in summarizing what is known,
may inhibit deeper understanding. How? Because their dry simplification typically
hides the questions, the issues, the history of the ideas, and the inquiries
that ultimately led to what we now know—the very process needed by the
learner to come to an understanding! Textbooks distort how understanding
develops, in the expert and the novice, by presenting only the cleaned-up
residue. You simply cannot learn to “do” the subject or understand it in depth
by studying only a simplified summation of findings; no one becomes a good
baseball player by merely reading the box scores of games in the newspaper.