Abstract
In June 1992 I spent three weeks visiting four schools in the new German states of Thuringia and Saxony where I conducted interviews with 20 teachers and 32 pupils about the changes that were occurring in their schools as they made the transition from socialist to capitalist society. Although the interviews showed great diversity of opinions about the adoption of the western German system of education, there was almost total unanimity among the respondents in their regard for the new western German textbooks. The consensus among teachers and pupils alike was that the old East German textbooks were superior to those of the West. In general, they found the East German texts better organized, easier to read, and pedagogically more sound. Their old books contained more examples to demonstrate an idea and more exercises for assuring comprehension. The ecologically minded even objected to the high gloss paper of the new western German texts and expressed a preference for the non-gloss recycled paper that had been used in the East. Presented with such a generally positive assessment of the East German texts, I was, of course, curious to sample the books personally. Happy to oblige me, the teachersand administrators provided me with texts from a variety of subjects, grade levels, and years of publication. My own observations of these texts follow. I have selected those texts to
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