Why are textbooks so boring?

There is an enormous disservice being done to Our Children: boring textbooks. They drone on with their "this happened, then this happened, then this was discovered" that no adult, much less an ADD, hormone-adled teenager, would find interesting.

Bill Bryson put this bug in my brain. I wish that I could send a copy of his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, to every kid in every high school science class in the English speaking world. He retells the history of the universe with the Brit-wit for which he is famous and beloved. And he's making me like astronomy. He also paints such compelling, bumbling portraits of the scientists for whom all of our nebulas, phenomenons and theories are named. We forget that science, at the end of the day, is simply a way of being systematically curious and that many funny mistakes are made along the way. For instance, Percival Lowell, an astronomer who began the search for Pluto, also believed that Mars was covered with canals built by "industrious Martians" for irrigating the arid areas nearer its equator.

I wish I could write text books that find the humor, wit and wisdom in the story of the American Revolution, presidents, calculus and organic chemistry. I was an A student and that stuff still left me cold. But I memorized the information, like eating my veggies.

If educational texts could make kids laugh or tempt them with tales of scandal, controversy, failure and triumph, maybe they'd relate. They'd fear trying and failing less because they'd realize all the Greats fumble at some point. Maybe history would stop repeating itself so much. Or maybe they'd just remember to search the night sky for supernovae once in awhile and recycle more.