Modern perspective on it is constantly evolving, especially on more recent bits, and there's plenty topics I'd rather have my kids being taught with a perspective from this century (E.g. to take my local German perspective, events surrounding WW2 and post-war development). Also, plenty things that happened while you were alive are History now. (remember, kids finishing high school now weren't born when 9/11 happened)
Languages: Languages change (German literally added a letter in the past decade, new words are created, how people speak changes, ...). Language studies tend to be steeped in cultural aspects too, both for native and foreign languages (e.g. media literacy should probably cover internet material differently than it did when I was in high school, explaining the US media landscape in the English books probably also should look differently now). Being somewhat up-to-date with topics also helps students being interested.
> Science?
More stable, but also not frozen. Especially in biology and with medical topics you'll have changes, but other sciences too especially where discussing applications, but that's not as critical.
Some more examples:
Geography: If you'd given me 10 years old material in my first geography lessons even which country the lesson took place in would have been wrong.
Any kind of thing that deals with law/demographics/economics/politics (how exactly that's divided up into different subjects very much depends on where you are, it often comes up in material for other subjects) will benefit from regular review and updates.
A textbook being outdated doesn't mean the entire thing is useless now, often its just small sections that will stand out badly if not updated.
> Languages: Languages change (German literally added a letter in the past decade, new words are created, how people speak changes, ...).
If one learned German from a forty year old textbook the only problem related to that that you would experience in Germany would be that some people would think you were speaking rather more formally than expected. Learning it from an up to date text book isn't going to make you noticeably better at communicating with actual Germans in real life, that takes actual immersion in the language as it is really spoken.
And the German language authorities might well have added a new letter or changed the spelling of the word spagetti but that doesn't mean that every German has.
Textbooks are of very limited use in the real world.
Using a textbook with spellings that disagree with the dictionary in K-12 language education is going to be ... interesting. Not something you'd do if you can avoid it. And the bits talking about the GDR are going to be a bit out of place...
Can you use outdated material? Sure, but that's different than pretending it isn't outdated or that outdated material can't get in the way.
For small sections, a pamphlet supplement would be all that's necessary, if that. The teacher can just say "that sentence is outdated, today we're pretty sure the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid."
It is laughable to suggest that history does not change. Even studying history at the equivalent of high school had me comparing secondary sources from the 1960s, to the 1990s, to just a couple years prior. History, or rather our interpretation of it, is constantly evolving.
I expect it is the same for most of the humanities.
Being an amateur historian myself, most of that smacks of political fashion. The (very) shallow view of history taught by K-12 doesn't need to change. The War of 1812 hasn't moved to 1814 yet. Hitler still lost WW2. Edison still invented the first practical lightbulb, despite all the attempts to dethrone him :-)
Studying history formally isn't about memorising stuff you are interested in. I have a lot of sovietology books now, that doesn't make me a sovietologist because I don't consider myself able to really analyze the sources properly.
Teaching history is not about becoming a historian. Being a professional historian comes with it some standard practices and methods, which is irrelevant if you're not a pro. Though I have learned to not trust "history" books written by journalists, who usually write them because they have a political axe to grind.
As for historical facts, you cannot understand history without knowing any facts about it. For example, you cannot understand the American Revolution without knowing who the major players were and some idea of what their roles were.
BTW, I have an interest in Soviet history. I'm interested in your recommendations on the best books on the topic.
I have a bunch of EM textbooks from the 40s and 50s on my bookshelves, the field has changed quite a lot i.e. I understand what they are saying, but the mathematical formalism is very obtuse and the applications are often irrelevant outside of the very basics.
The Feynman lectures were recorded prior to the standard model for example, still excellent but hopelessly out of date as an introduction to undergraduate physics in that particular area.
Also, old textbooks that didn't make it to still being in print today may not be out of date but they may be bad pedagogy. A certain percent of everything is crap, textbooks are no different.
> A certain percent of everything is crap, textbooks are no different.
When it comes to classic literature, if you randomly choose a book that is still around after 100 years and randomly choose a book that was written in the last 5 years, odds are the older book will be a better book.
I thought you meant all textbooks, my bad. If this is just about high school then I mostly agree wrt to the amount of waste.
I think the solution would have to come down from the top however, in the UK at least the way our exams are marked means using an old textbook could be a fairly dangerous affair without an astute teacher (due to the ridiculously anal markschemes and philistine syllabus, this does bite people)
Most undergraduate textbooks are still fine. Though I agree that some topics change fast, like electronics beyond basic circuit analysis. Certainly comp-sci :-) Wow has that changed.
Current events? Yup. Just bring a newspaper to class.