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From Core77's Hack2School: The Ultimate Design Student Guide.

My freshman year in college I took a philosophy course from a professor who began by announcing that no textbooks would be used in his class. Plenty of books were required, however. "I want you to come out of this course with the beginnings of a good library," the professor told us, "and textbooks have no place in such a library. Nothing in the world has less value than a used textbook."

So we were not assigned any books with titles like "Introduction to Philosophy," or "Foundations of Empirical Thought," written by scholars whose training and degrees presumably qualified them to interpret what thinkers thought. The books we read were original material, the works of the thinkers themselves: Plato, Aristotle, William James, Bertrand Russell, Albert North Whitehead, Kant, Descartes...

I argued with Plato, mocked Immanuel Kant, challenged the logic of William James, talked back to Aristotle. Of course they couldn't respond; but given the stupidity and naiveté of some of my comments, that was just as well. And it offered advantages the internet can't. The satisfaction of online exchange comes at a cost: the dead can't play. Sure, you can talk to Michael Beirut and Yves Béhar. But you can't reach Raymond Loewy or Norman Bel Geddes in the blogosphere.

The professor's flattering assumption was that students were smart enough to confront ideas directly. Maybe we were, but this was heady stuff and tough to go through without the organizational crutch of a textbook author. I cannot imagine getting through it at all, had the professor not provided us with a tip: "Make each book your own," he exhorted, "by annotating and footnoting and indexing it for yourself."

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